The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Peter Pan

And sometimes names come out of almost nothing. W.E. Henley (the poet who wrote Invictus and not much else)[8] had a daughter named Margaret. Margaret died when she was only five years old, but not before she had met J.M. Barrie. She liked Mr Barrie and tried to call him her friendy, but being only five and horribly ill, all she could make of the word was wendy.

J.M. Barrie then went off and wrote a play about a boy called Peter Pan who takes a girl and her two brothers off to Neverland. He named the heroine Wendy in memory of little Margaret Henley. So he gave her a sort of immortality, for the play was so popular that parents started to name their daughters after the central character. Although, why you would name your daughter after a girl who runs away from home with a strange boy the second the dog’s not looking, is a mystery.

Unfortunately, in Peter Pan, Wendy is shot with an arrow and dies. However, her death isn’t a serious matter, as after a little bit of make-believe she recovers enough to start singing in her sleep. Her song is about how she wants a house, and so Peter and his associates build a tiny cottage around her dormant body. This was, of course, the first Wendy House.

Back in London, Mr Darling, Wendy’s father, is rather morose about the disappearance of his progeny. He realises that it’s all his fault, as he had forced the family dog to sleep out in the kennel. So, as a penance, he takes to sleeping in the kennel himself. In fact, he never leaves the kennel at all and is transported to work in it every day. He is scrupulously polite and raises his hat to any lady who looks inside, but he remains in the doghouse. And so popular was Peter Pan that Mr Darling’s fate became a phrase.

So that’s a name, a noun and a phrase: all from one story. But Barrie also took names that had been around already.

The most famous admirer of Peter Pan was Michael Jackson, a singer and composer of indeterminate tan, who named his home Neverland. This means that Mr Jackson must have been working from the novelisation, because in the original play of Peter Pan, Peter doesn’t live in Neverland, but in Never Never Land, a name that Barrie got from a thoroughly real place.

The very remotest and most unwelcoming parts of Australia, in Queensland and the Northern Territory, are known as Never Never Land, although today this is often shortened by Australians to The Never Never. Why give a place a name that refers to time? There have been various explanations for that.

It was claimed in 1908 that it was called Never Never because those who lived there never never wanted to leave, an explanation so remarkably unconvincing that it deserves a prize. An earlier and more plausible story comes from the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1862:

But the actual origin is a little older and much more racial. A book of 1833 described the strangely peaceful wars of the local aborigines:

So Barrie’s imaginary place came from part of Australia named after blacks who would never never have anything to do with white-skinned people. This origin is rather odd when you think about Michael Jackson.