ICU and You · The Literary Edge · Number 2
A dead brother, a hospital, and the strangest copyright in English law
The crossword for this topic has PAN in it, clued as a boy who never grew up and has been paying for children who do. That is a joke about a copyright. Underneath it is a family that lost a child.
The first piece in this column took a passage three thousand years old and found a cot death in it. This one is the same species: a story everybody knows, with a dead child at the bottom of it that almost nobody thinks about.
In January 1867, James Barrie's older brother David died in a skating accident in Kirriemuir, two days short of his fourteenth birthday. James was six. Their mother, Margaret Ogilvy, did not recover, and by most accounts never really tried to. The family story — which Barrie told himself, at length, in the memoir he wrote about her — is of a small boy learning to imitate his dead brother's whistle and wearing his clothes to be let into his mother's darkened room, and of her one consolation being that David would never grow up and leave her.
Whether Barrie understood the connection is beside the point. He spent a career writing variations on the same figure, and the version that stuck — a boy who will not age, who comes in at the nursery window, who takes children away from their mothers — reads very differently once you know that a thirteen-year-old left the house one winter afternoon and did not come back.
The play is usually remembered as an adventure. Read it again and the engine of it is a girl being told it is time to leave the nursery, and refusing, and then going anyway. Wendy is at the edge of childhood. The Lost Boys are school age. Peter is the only one who does not move, and the story treats that as the tragedy rather than the reward.
Which is why it belongs in a fortnight about children of six to twelve. This is the age at which the question arrives: what am I giving up, and what am I becoming? A four-year-old does not ask it. A sixteen-year-old has largely answered it. Between those, it is the whole weather.
It matters clinically too, and more than it sounds. The school-age child in your unit knows they are supposed to be brave, knows the adults are frightened, and has worked out that growing up means managing other people's feelings about you. That is exactly what Wendy does in the first act, and it is exactly what the nine-year-old does when they tell you they are fine.
Great Ormond Street opened in 1852 with ten beds, the first hospital in Britain to provide inpatient beds specifically for children. Charles West had spent years arguing that children were not small adults and needed their own institution — an argument he had to make, because it was not obvious.
That is worth sitting with for a moment. There was a time, and not a distant one, when the proposition that a sick child might need something different from a sick adult was a novel idea requiring a campaign. This fortnight's aphorism argues that the mantra which came out of that campaign has since become a hindrance. Both things are true. A good idea can win so completely that it outlives its usefulness.
In 1929 Barrie gave the Peter Pan copyright to the hospital. He asked that the sums never be disclosed, and they never have been. When the copyright expired, Parliament did something it has done for no other work: an amendment to the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 granted Great Ormond Street a perpetual right to royalties from stage performances, publication, broadcast and adaptation in the United Kingdom — not ownership, and not a veto, but an income with no end date.
So the boy who would not grow up funds, in perpetuity, the treatment of children who will. It is the neatest thing in English intellectual property law and nobody designed it; it fell out of a bereaved author's gesture and a peer's amendment eighty years apart.
There is a temptation to make this tidier than it is. Barrie's relationship with the Llewelyn Davies boys, whose childhood he borrowed for the story and whose guardianship he later took on, has been argued over for a century and does not resolve into anything comfortable. Two of those boys died young. The memoir about his mother is, read now, an unsettling document.
And the sentimental reading — that a grieving family produced something beautiful and everybody benefited — skips the part where a mother spent decades in a darkened room and a six-year-old learned to impersonate a corpse to be noticed. Grief made this. It did not redeem it.
This is a piece about the most unusual copyright in English law, so it is a piece where being careful about quotation is the point. Barrie's words are his, the hospital's arrangement is a statutory right rather than a general licence, and none of the text appears here.
Which is itself the argument. A century after the gift, the thing still has to be handled properly to keep working. That is true of most inheritances, including the clinical ones.
What have you read — a novel, a poem, a play, scripture, anything at all — that taught you something about medicine your training never did?
This column runs on those. Send me the book and the moment, and what it showed you. I will use them, with or without your name as you prefer.
And a second, for this piece in particular: have you met a family whose grief took a shape you did not expect? Barrie's mother found her consolation in the fact that her son would never grow up. People carry it in stranger ways than the textbooks allow for.
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