J. M. Barrie
1860–1937

Sir James Matthew, O.M. (Bart. 1913), Chancellor of Edinburgh University (1930), was born on 9 May 1860 in Kirriemuir, Angus, and was educated there and at Dumfries Academy and Edinburgh University, taking his M.A. in 1882. After a year and a half as a journalist in Nottingham, he settled in London, and became a regular contributor to the St James’s Gazette, British Weekly (as ‘Gavin Ogilvy’), National Observer, Speaker etc: His first volume, Better Dead (1887), was largely a satire on London Life; In Auld Licht Idylls (1888) he opened a new and rich vein, the humour and the pathos of his native village. ‘Thrums’, that village, still furnishes the keynote to When a Man’s Single (1888), nominally a tale of literary life in London; and still more to A Window in Thrums (1889). The Little Minister (1891), his first novel, came out in Good Words, and showed grim humour, pathos, power of character-sketching and nature-description, with the gift of veracious and vivacious dialogue, but was fantastic and less true to nature than his shorter tales and sketches; it was dramatised in 1897. Walker, London, a farcical comedy, had a prodigious run at Toole’s Theatre in 1892. Other successful pieces were The Professor’s Love Story (1895), Quality Street, The Admirable Crichton, Little Mary, Peter Pan (most famous of all: 1904), Alice-Sit-by-the-Fire (1905), What Every Woman Knows (1908), Dear Brutus (1917), Mary Rose (1920), Shall we Join the Ladies? (1922), The Boy David (1936). Sentimental Tommy (1896), a story, was continued in Tommy and Grizel (1900); Margaret Ogilvy (1896 dealt with his mother’s life); The Little White Bird appeared in 1902. Sir James Barrie died on 20 June 1937.