'Peter Pan, The Companion Edition' Presents Barrie's Complete 1911 Novel Peter and Wendy, the Novel, Not the Stage Play, with Explainers, a Neverland Map Activity, and Discussion Questions Fenced Until the Last Chapter

The 1911 first edition of the novel, collated against a scan of the Hodder & Stoughton printing, with an introduction on the narrator the stage cannot give you

NEW YORK, Oct. 31, 2026, Everybody knows the play, the films, and the boy who wouldn't grow up. Fewer know the book Barrie himself made of him: *Peter and Wendy*, the novel published in London by Hodder & Stoughton and in New York by Charles Scribner's Sons in October 1911, seven years after the stage play *Peter Pan* opened, and seventeen years before that play was published at all. A new Companion Classics edition, Peter Pan, The Companion Edition, presents the complete novel, 47,017 words, all seventeen chapters, unabridged, in the text of the 1911 first edition of the novel, taken from Project Gutenberg eBook #16 and collated against an Internet Archive scan of the 1911 Hodder & Stoughton printing (located-chapter token agreement 0.962-0.975; a 102-probe test across all seventeen chapters matched at 90.2%, every miss resolving to scan noise; no substantive variants were found, and the edition's provenance note says so plainly). It is the novel throughout, not the 1904 stage play, and not any later retelling, and the edition's naming and copy keep that distinction exact.

What the novel has, and no adaptation carries at full strength, is its narrator: an adult voice that leans into the nursery, conspires with child readers against the grown-ups, and turns, without warning, quite cold, the voice that calls Peter "gay and innocent and heartless" and means all three words. Around him the book builds the Darling household in full, a father who must be exactly like his neighbours, a mother with one kiss nobody has ever got, and a Newfoundland dog for a nurse, chained in the yard on the one night she was needed, and then the island: the home under the ground, the mermaids' lagoon, Hook and his ticking crocodile, and a final chapter this edition fences, in all its material, until the reader's group reaches it.

Around the novel, the companion material, all of it original to this edition, includes an introduction on the book's narrator and on Peter's forgetting, what staying a child costs everyone around him; a Who's Who of thirteen entries, the crocodile honestly among them; four explainers, covering the path from the 1904 play to the 1911 novel, the Neverland and its map, the Edwardian nursery world of the Darlings, and Barrie, the Llewelyn Davies boys behind the Lost Boys, and his 1929 gift of the Peter Pan copyright to Great Ormond Street Hospital; a short life of J. M. Barrie; an honest note on the period, addressing the novel's 1911 depictions of the island's Native American characters directly; a reading schedule in four meetings; and thirty discussion questions, spoiler-fenced by meeting, so that the ending, the last chapter, the window, and what time does to Wendy, stays shut until Barrie opens it.

Alongside the book, Peter Pan, Book Club Kit offers the edition's discussion material as a printable PDF (26 pages, US Letter) for book clubs and families reading together: the four-meeting plan, the Who's Who and explainers in full, all thirty discussion questions arranged by meeting, and Draw Your Neverland, a map worksheet in four stages on which each group draws the island its own reading made, leaving one road unfinished. The kit is available for $7 through the editor's Payhip store: https://payhip.com/horaceharriottjr

Peter Pan, The Companion Edition is available now as an eBook ($9.99) through Payhip: https://payhip.com/horaceharriottjr, and in The Classics and Companions Shop on the editor's Linktree. Print editions follow on Amazon (paperback, $14.99; hardcover, $24.99). The novel's text is public domain in the United States (published 1911), and this edition is published US-first. Its position on the United Kingdom is stated exactly: Barrie gifted the Peter Pan copyright to Great Ormond Street Hospital in 1929; the novel's UK copyright (Barrie died in 1937) has expired, but section 301 of the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 gives the hospital a perpetual right to royalties in respect of performances, broadcasts and commercial publication of the stage play *Peter Pan* (and adaptations of it) in the UK; this edition prints the 1911 novel, is published US-first, and makes no UK claims. The 1911 editions' illustrations by F. D. Bedford are not reproduced in this edition, usable restored scans were not obtained, and the edition claims no illustrations it does not contain; its cover is an original painting made for this edition, and no film, stage, or animated design or branding is used anywhere in it. This is an independent publication, not affiliated with or endorsed by Great Ormond Street Hospital or by any adaptation.

About the editor

Horace Harriott Jr. is a New York-based author and editor of more than two dozen books, including The Side Hustle Handbook, Master Playbook and The Ultimate Commissary Cookbook. This edition is part of his Companion Classics series of reading-together editions of public-domain classics.

About the book

Peter Pan, The Companion Edition, J. M. Barrie (author), Horace Harriott Jr. (editor). Companion Classics, independently published, October 2026. Text: the first edition of the novel *Peter and Wendy* (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1911; Charles Scribner's Sons, New York, 1911), via Project Gutenberg eBook #16, collated against an IA scan of the 1911 Hodder & Stoughton printing; 17 chapters; 47,017 words; no illustrations reproduced (see note above); interior proof 208 pages, 6 x 9 in.; published US-first.