The Girl Who Called Barrie Fwendy

A Poetry Tale about William Ernest Henley, told by Hello Doggo.

Here’s a little girl you’ve never heard of, whose name you’ve almost certainly said out loud.

Margaret Henley. Born in eighteen eighty-eight, the only child of William Ernest Henley, the one-legged poet who wrote Invictus. Her father doted on her. And one of the grown-ups who came to the house was a small, shy Scotsman called James Barrie.

The story goes that Margaret couldn’t quite manage her Rs. So Barrie wasn’t her friend. He was her fwendy. And, the way small children do, she stretched it: her fwendy-wendy.

In February eighteen ninety-four, she died of meningitis. She was five years old.

Ten years later, Barrie opened a play in London about a boy who wouldn’t grow up. And the girl who flies away with him is called Wendy.

Now, a word of caution, because the name-spotters get terribly cross about this. Barrie did not invent the name. A scattering of Wendys turn up in old census returns, decades before. What he did was take a name almost nobody used and hand it to millions of parents. And the line from Margaret to Wendy is the story everybody tells. It’s lovely, it’s plausible, and, as far as anyone knows, no note in Barrie’s hand settles it.

When Henley died, in nineteen-oh-three, his ashes were laid in Margaret’s grave, in the churchyard at Cockayne Hatley, in Bedfordshire.

Henley’s most famous poem is about a man unbowed by fate. Fate took Margaret anyway. But if the story’s true, every Wendy since has carried a little girl’s lisp.