“Peter Pan” debuted on the London stage 110 years ago on December 27, 1904. The play by Scottish author and playwright J.M. Barrie was subtitled “the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up,” and it was an instant success, traveling across the Atlantic to play on Broadway the following year. While it was this play that introduced the Peter Pan mythos to a wide audience, it wasn’t Barrie’s first use of the eternally young flying boy, who had appeared in a few relatively light chapters of a darker novel called “The Little White Bird” in 1902. After the success of the play, Barrie revisited the novel, pulling out the relevant chapters and re-releasing them in a children's book called “Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens.”

As a journalist, novelist and playwright, Barrie left behind plenty of writings and had multiple successes during his lifetime. But the ever-youthful Pan has outlived him, and proven to be his lasting mark on the culture. The stories are pretty airy stuff (at least on the surface), but their origin contains more somber material. Barrie devised the character of Peter Pan from stories he told the sons of a family he befriended, whom he dressed up as pirates and told that their brother Peter could fly. Both boys’ parents died between 1907-1910, leaving Barrie and the boys’ nurse as their co-guardians. It’s also been suggested that his own brother’s death two days before his 14th birthday in an ice skating accident inspired Barrie to create the character. While Barrie’s mother was devastated at losing her son, she seemed to take comfort in knowing that he would forever be a boy.

True to his nature, Peter Pan hasn’t aged a day, even as the culture has grown up around him…and he still pops up from time to time as a reminder of eternal youth. A musical adaptation from 1954 has supplanted Barrie’s original play in popularity in the United States, and it was that version which brought audiences a singing Christopher Walken-Captain Hook in a live TV production earlier this month…just the latest in a string of adaptations running from the silent film era to Disney to Robin Williams and beyond. (Gisele Bundchen was a slightly more, ahem…grown up…Wendy in this photo by Annie Leibovitz, with Tina Fey as Tinker Bell.) Back in the U.K., the original play has given way to pantomime showings of the story, which are popular around Christmas. Whether in 1904 or 2014, audiences seem to enjoy having a Neverland to escape to every now and then.

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