Two of the most iconic characters in children’s literature were, famously, based on real children: Alice, of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, was inspired by a little girl named Alice Liddell (later Hargreaves). 10-year-old Alice and her sisters were on a rowboat with the 30-year-old Charles Dodgson (later Lewis Carroll) when she asked him to tell them a story—when he did, about a little girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hold on May 4th (the real Alice’s birthday), it was so good that she asked him to write it down. (Scholars disagree on how much the fictional Alice resembles Liddell, and also on how sinister Dodgson’s intentions toward her might have been.) 

 

J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and the lost boys were also inspired by children in his life: Peter Llewelyn Davies and his four brothers, who called Barrie, a friend of their parents who would eventually become one of their guardians, Uncle Jim. Peter Pan, it seems, was not even specifically based on Peter—his brothers George and Michael were much closer to Barrie—but the name created a lifelong connection that haunted him. “If that perennially juvenile lead, if that boy so fatally committed to an arrestation of his development,” Peter later wrote, “had only been dubbed George, or Jack, or Michael, or Nicholas, what miseries would have been spared me.” In dedicating a 1928 edition of Peter Pan to the Davies brothers, Barrie wrote, “I suppose I always knew that I made Peter by rubbing the five of you together.” Both George and Michael died young, and in 1960, after many years of depression, Peter threw himself in front of a train. The Boy Who Never Grew Up is Dead, one headline read. 

 

But decades before that, on June 28, 1932, the two “originals” met at a Lewis Carroll centenary exhibition hosted by Bumpus Bookshop in London. Alice was 80; Peter was 35. The meeting has become legendary in its own right, though there is no record of what they said to one another. John Logan wrote a play about the encounter, Peter and Alice, which opened in London in 2013; it starred Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw and was directed by Michael Grandage. 

 

“Logan imagines them backtracking in time to relive their original encounters with the authors who made them famous,” wrote Michael Billington in a review of the play for The Guardian. “They also actively engage with the fictional Alice and Peter. But at the heart of the play lies a deep division: while the aged, hard-up Mrs Hargreaves finds consolation in her memories, Davies is forever haunted by his family's tragedies and the recollection of Barrie's over-controlling possessiveness. . . . It's not a play that shocks or startles by its insights, but the reward lies in watching Dench and Whishaw recreate the agony and the ecstasy of inherited fame.”