Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens from The Little White Bird: A "New" Edition Illustrated by Arthur Rackham

London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1908. 1908 at title page; stated Fifth Edition. Large 8" x 10" x 2" design. Brick red full cloth boards, bright gilt embossed cover design and flourishing spine titles, moderate shelf wear. Cover depicts stylized titles w/image of infant hands-free on bucking goat. Protected in clear sleeve. Deckled pages very good, no writing; first couple w/moderate fox. Frontispiece mounted plate w/captioned tissue guard: "There now arose a mighty sotrm and he was tossed this way and that". Dark olive matte pictorial endpapers featuring Rackham's map Peter's village. Dark green tinted text block at all sides. Features fifty color plates by Arthur Rackham mounted on heavy stock dark green matte leaves w/captioned tissue guards throughout illlustrated latter half of volume. Bind good; hinges intact. Near very good example of this profusely illustration edition. In Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, J.M. Barrie first created Peter Pan as an infant, living a wild and secret life with birds and fairies in the middle of London. Later Barrie let this remarkable child grow a little older and he became the boy-hero of Neverland, making his first appearance with Wendy, Captain Hook, and the Lost Boys. Barrie's novel The Little White Bird of 1902 contains the first sketches for Peter Pan. The narrator is 'a gentle, whimsical, lonely old bachelor', an author by profession, whose ambition is to have a son. He meets a penniless young couple whose own son David fulfills his desire. The narrator explains that all children in our part of London were once birds in the Kensington Gardens. And, that the reason there are bars on nursery windows and a tall fender by the fire is because very little people sometimes forget that they no longer have wings, and try to fly away through the window or up the chimney. One such child, Peter Pan, escaped from being a human when he was seven days old and flew back to the Kensington Gardens. The Peter Pan stories were Barrie's only works for children, but as their persistent popularity shows, their themes of imaginative escape continue to charm even those who long ago left Neverland. Printed in Great Britain by T. and A. Constable, Printers to His Majesty at the University Press, Edinburgh. 127 pages. Insured post.. Fifth Edition. Hard Cover. Very Good. Illus. by Rackham, Arthur. 4to - over 9¾" - 12" tall.