ONE: Roots of the rejuvenile I DON''T WANT TO GO TO SCHOOL AND LEARN SOLEMN THINGS. NO ONE IS GOING TO CATCH ME, LADY, AND MAKE ME A MAN. I WANT TO BE A LITTLE BOY AND HAVE FUN. --J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan Before he was a cash cow for Walt Disney, an inspiration for Steven Spielberg, and an obsession for Michael Jackson, Peter Pan was simply a revelation. When J. M.

Barrie''s play Peter Pan, subtitled The Boy Who Wouldn''t Grow Up, opened at the Duke of York Theater in 1904, it announced the arrival of something entirely new. The theatrical fashion of the time was for so-called problem plays, heart-wrenching melodramas that dealt with social ills and political complexities. Parting that gloom was Barrie''s tale of a flying boy, his fairy sidekick, and their adventures in a faraway land where children remained children forever. Part farce, part pantomime, part inside joke, Peter Pan was a tale of pirates and fairies told in the sophisticated language of adults. Based on tall tales Barrie spun to amuse the five sons of a local barrister--his favorite being a rascal called George whom he met in Kensington Gardens when the boy was all of five--Peter Pan was the sort of cross-generational sensation that would become a model for mass entertainments of the next one hundred years. First of the preteen heroes, Peter Pan attracted a rabid following of young matinee fans. But his real power was over a generation raised on fairy tales and nonsense rhymes and now anxiously adjusting to the social changes and gadgetry of a new century. On the night of the premiere, according to Barrie biographer Andrew Birkin, "the elite of London society, with few children among them, emulated Sentimental Tommy by ''flinging off the years and whistling childhood back.

''" Wistful, lighthearted, and condemned by a chorus of critics who saw no good in such open celebration of childishness, Peter Pan was the first of the rejuvenile blockbusters. Peter Pan was all the more resonant because it was the product of a celebrated public figure who shared his hero''s deep ambivalence about adulthood. James Matthew Barrie was a small and moody Scotsman with a bushy mustache and no interest whatsoever in growing up in any conventional sense. Of this, he''d apparently always been sure. "Greatest horror--dream that I am married--wake up screaming," the eighteen-year-old wrote in his college diary. "Grow up and have to give up marbles--awful thought." While Barrie eventually did get married, to a comely stage actress named Mary Ansell, he made few other concessions to adulthood. When he wasn''t locked away in his study, Barrie liked nothing more than practicing magic tricks, wrestling his giant St.

Bernard, and most of all, playing with the sons of barrister Llewelyn Davies, whom he dressed as pirates, wrote stories for and about, and kept entertained with his vast knowledge of cricket, fishing, and Sir Walter Scott. There has never been any evidence that Barrie''s relationship with the Davies boys was anything but friendly, but their closeness has nonetheless prompted psychoanalytic suspicion and prurient interest ever since. Critics have scoured his biography for clues to explain Barrie''s lifelong fight against traditional adulthood. Was he stunted by the death of his older brother, the doting of his indulgent mother, or the rejection of his loveless wife? All those things undoubtedly had a profound impact on Barrie, but one ultimately learns very little attempting to attach this misery or that to his rejuvenile tendencies. Barrie''s legacy has less to do with his private sorrow than his articulation of childhood as a poetic and primitive life force that can linger long after its expected expiration. More than a fairy tale, Peter Pan announced the arrival of a new and enduring breed of adult. The Invention of Adulthood When I set out to learn about the roots of the rejuvenile, I didn''t expect to find much. I figured a quick historical survey would turn up little scraps here and there--a few childish eccentrics in ancient Rome, maybe a popular children''s game in Colonial America, perhaps a juvenile fashion craze from the 1920s.

But early in my search for historical precedents, one thing became clear: This has all happened before. In seemingly every book I opened on social history, children''s literature, or popular culture, I landed again and again on parallels from the same few decades. 1865: Alice''s Adventures in Wonderland is embraced by children and adults. 1893: Grown-ups flock to the first amusement park at the World''s Fair in Chicago. 1893: The first newspaper comic strip, featuring a one-toothed, bald-headed ragamuffin called the Yellow Kid, is published. 1907: The Scouting movement is founded by a self-described "boy-man." And at the very peak of that kidcentric period was the 1902 premiere of Peter Pan, which neatly summed up the myth of the eternal child. For rejuveniles today, all roads lead back to Peter Pan and the turn of the twentieth century.

The natural capacities of children, which for centuries had been viewed as weak and wayward, were over the course of these few years discovered as a primary source of inspiration and profit. It would be another century before the rejuvenile rebellion we know today, but resistance to what historian Woody Register calls "the enfeebling prudence, restraint and solemnity of growing up" began here, with the first flight of Pan and the dawn of the twentieth century. The temptation today is to think of adulthood as a historic and natural fact. In a 2004 essay on "The Perpetual Adolescent," Joseph Epstein wrote that historically, adulthood was treated as the "lengthiest and most earnest part of life, where everything serious happened." To stray outside the defined boundaries of adulthood, he wrote, was "to go against what was natural and thereby to appear unseemly, to put one''s world somehow out of joint, to be, let''s face it, a touch, and perhaps more than a touch, grotesque." A quick survey of history, however, reveals that adulthood is neither as ingrained or ancient as Epstein and other Harrumphing Codgers assume. Before the Industrial Revolution, no one thought much about adulthood, and even less about childhood. In sixteenth-century Europe, for instance, "children shared the same games with adults, the same toys, the same fairy stories.

They lived their lives together, never apart," notes historian J. H. Plumb. This shouldn''t suggest that people in olden times didn''t distinguish between kids and grown-ups. Of course they did. The distinction forms the basis of rites of passage that are as old as human history, as well as some of more recent vintage. Amazonian initiation rites, Jewish Bar and Bat Mitzvahs, Muslim Khtme Qur''ans, Christian confirmations, American debutante balls--all serve the same basic function: to formally announce the end of childhood and the assumption of new duties and freedoms. It''s a mistake, though, to confuse maturity with adulthood.

The maturity celebrated in traditional rites of passage--assured variously by the onset of menstruation, the acquisition of literacy, or the ability to stalk and slit the throat of a large prairie mammal--is not the same thing as the idea of adulthood hatched a century ago by a coterie of Victorian clergymen and society ladies. Maturity is old. "Adulthood" is new. The fact is that, for most of human history, age simply didn''t matter much. Everyone from Aristotle to Dante had idly puzzled over the comparable merits of each stage of life, with an obviously middle-aged Aristotle arguing that middle age was best, since young people exhibited too much trust and old people too little. But such distinctions were mostly made by philosophers; for average people, age was more a matter of biology than identity. Children got the hard end of this bargain. For more than two thousand years, from antiquity to the eighteenth century, children had little of the special status they now enjoy.

Young people were mostly treated as deficient, imperfect creatures whose lives and interests were largely unimportant and certainly nothing any adult would want to emulate. There''s some disagreement about precisely when adults first developed an awareness and feeling for childhood. French historian Philippe Aries''s seminal 1961 book Centuries of Childhood held that childhood was "discovered" between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries; other scholars have pointed to eighth-century monks who wrote admiringly of children''s capacity for wisdom and honesty. In any case, it''s clear that today''s obsession with the moral and physical development of children is relatively new. As recently as the eighteenth century, the word childhood was understood to mean littleness, immaturity, irresponsibility, helplessness, and irrationality--qualities that adults actively sought to restrain in their offspring and suppress in themselves. Partially, this low status was a product of hard biological and social realities; life spans were relatively brief and rates of infant mortality were so high that parents often had seven or eight children in the hopes that one or two would survive. "People could not allow themselves to become too attached to something they regarded as a probable loss," Aries wrote. Even those children who survived the perils of nature sometimes didn''t survive their elders; infanticide was a routine and often legal practice through the Middle Ages.

The depiction of children in medieval paintings offers an eerie demonstration of the perspective informing such atrocities--children appear as genderless and shrunken, with the extended limbs and mature features of people three times their size. It''s hard to figure which was worse: this sort of confused disregard, or the equa.