What’s a Kiss?

In 1896, S.R. Crockett published Cleg Kelly, Arab of the City, dedicating it to J.M. Barrie “with the hand of a comrade and the heart of a friend.” Eight years later, Peter Pan premiered on the London stage. Both works feature a strikingly similar scene: a boy who has never heard of a kiss asks “What is a kiss?” and a girl offers to show him. The textual parallels are structurally and linguistically precise.

This article examines that parallel in detail — tracing the documented friendship between Crockett and Barrie from the early 1890s, the evidence of Barrie’s intensive reading of Crockett’s work, and the thoroughgoing transformation Barrie wrought on the borrowed scene, changing its characters, its context, its comic resolution, and its narrative function.

The case is examined as a demonstration of how literary influence functions within circles of mutual respect, and how the magpie instinct — the absorption and reimagining of effective material from admired sources — constitutes a creative virtue rather than a moral failing. The article also places this case within the broader context of the plagiarism accusations against Crockett in 1894, in which Barrie himself was one of Crockett’s most steadfast defenders.

An article from the Reading Room of the S.R. Crockett Online Museum.