Peter Ibbetson, 1891 vs. 1935
Feb. 19th, 2026 03:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lb_leeRogan: I’ve gotten obsessed with a 130-year-old novel and its 90-year-old movie, and much like Dracula 2020, I’m gonna make it all y’all’s problem now!
Okay, so, I first learned of the existence of Peter Ibbetson from Leigh Eric Schmidt’s Heaven’s Bride: the Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman, a biography of a woman who married an angel in the 1890s and got harassed to death for it in 1902. According to Schmidt, “in exploring the possibility that her relationship with Soph [her husband] was all taking place on a ‘dream plane,’ Craddock drew particularly on George du Maurier’s popular novel Peter Ibbetson” (254-255). She was apparently such a big fan of the book that she recommended it to a friend in a letter: “it is a lovely poem, some parts of which are worth reading over and over again” (255). In her “diary of psychical experiences,” she also wrote that she wanted to ”master the art of ‘dreaming true,’ like Peter Ibbetson” and quotes her husband Soph as telling her, “Now, dear love, I want you to meet me in dream-life night after night, as Peter Ibbetson met his sweetheart” (255). Any story that Craddock and Soph were so interested in caught my attention, though I was reluctant to read 1800s literature.
But then I ran into it again, in Benjamin Walker’s Beyond the Body: the Human Double and the Astral Planes, a mess of a book from 1974 that nonetheless holds JUST enough gens in it that we are doomed to read the blasted thing. (Sybil came out in 1973, making this book a trove of metaphysical doubling and many-selvedness that JUST barely predates that pop culture craze, in its writing though not its publication date.) It mentions “a simple method of exteriorization is described by George Du Maurier in his novel Peter Ibbetson (1891) which portrays with a strange realism the interwoven dreams of the hero and the girl he loves... he is visited in his dream by Mary and in turn visits her by projecting his astral form from his prison cell. This he did by putting his hands behind his head, crossing his feet and then willing himself to the rendezvous. One of the subjects mentioned by Celia Green in her book on lucid dreams tells how he used the identical method described in Du Maurier’s novel. He spent one full day concentrating as far as possible on the idea of projecting himself to a certain place that night. When he went to bed he assumed the position described and immediately found himself in the street out of his body” (110). The Celia Green book he cites, Lucid Dreams, dates from 1968.
Well, son of a bitch. Two different reports from two (as far as I can tell) completely unrelated sources, roughly seventy years apart. Clearly I had to read this book.
Miraculously, the local library system still had one copy in open circulation, despite being over a century old. I read into it a bit, but then I lucked into a copy of the 1960s luxury printing from Heritage Press, which is an enormous slab of a book but that’s because Du Maurier’s beautiful illustrations (he was a cartoonist long before he became a writer) are reproduced at 100% size and also carefully placed at the proper places in the book. (The library’s older pocket size printing shrinks the illustrations considerably, and they are sometimes placed haphazardly.) Plus the Heritage Press printing comes with extra details about Du Maurier’s life and the circumstances surrounding the creation of the book. Definitely worth the cost!
So what is the book about, anyway? Like Du Maurier himself, the titular protagonist of Peter Ibbetson is a French/English man; that feeling of ethnic dislocation is a prominent theme. After an idyllic childhood in Paris with a beloved invalid playmate, Mimsy, they are separated from their beloved homes and each other after a cholera outbreak kills both of Peter’s parents and Mimsy’s mom. Mimsy travels with her loving but grieving father, while Peter is carted off by his villainous uncle, who Anglicizes Peter’s name from Pierre, forcibly bestows his own English last name of Ibbetson, and carts the boy off to London, where he’s miserable.
Nostalgia, the longing for a return to a home that no long exists, is also a HUGE part of the book. Peter escapes his nasty uncle as soon as possible to become, eventually, an architect of middling talent but zero enthusiasm. He has a lingering unhappiness he can’t put his finger on, has trouble making friends or meeting girls, and he forever longs for the Paris of his childhood, but when he returns on holiday fifteen years later, he is heartbroken to discover that of course, the place has drastically changed. You can never go home again, after all.
Or can you? He meets a beautiful, enchanting woman, the Duchess of Towers, and is startled to share a dream with her, where she teaches him the art of “dreaming true.” Neither of them think the dream is real, so imagine their surprise when they share dreams over and over, in a reconstruction of their beloved childhood neighborhood! It turns out the Duchess of Towers is Peter’s beloved playmate Mimsy! Due to their respective name changes and relocations, they’d completely lost track of each other! But alas! Though their love rekindles, she is married to a cad, and has a son. They cannot be together! So they do their best to avoid each other in the dream world. (They live in completely different places corporeally so rarely encounter each other in the “real” world.)
But then things take a strange turn. Peter discovers his villainous uncle has claimed that he is Peter’s own father... by boinking Peter’s beloved mom, the uncle’s own relation! Even in 1890s language, the story makes it clear it was NOT consensual, if it indeed happened... and while it seems unlikely, it’s not totally impossible, an ambiguity that horrifies and enrages Peter. (Peter is a man who REALLY loves his parents and his wife-to-be.) He confronts his uncle, challenges him to a duel, and when the old man tries to pull an, “Aye, ‘twas I who fucked your mother! And I’m NOT SORRY EITHER!” Peter murders him. He is only spared the death penalty by the number of people coming forward to say, “No, his uncle was a douchebag and nobody’s sorry he’s dead, he totally deserved it.” Peter’s sentence is commuted... to life imprisonment.
Meanwhile, Mary, Duchess of Towers is keeping busy. Her invalid son dies, she leaves her shit husband, and throws her considerable wealth and power to saving Peter from the gallows, and then building children’s hospitals, helping abandoned women, and other noble enterprises. Thus freed from her own romantic attachments, they embark on an epic love in the dream realm, explore the extent of that realm, travel through psychogenetic history, become their childhood selves’ imaginary friends, and have an ecstatically happy marriage, though a purely noncorporeal and nocturnal one. Mary is the one to die first, but she manages to come back to comfort Peter in his grief, and also inform him of the joys that await him... not in a Christian heaven, but in a mysterious sort of rejoining the human race’s soul gestalt, which is forever working to teach and improve itself. Thus consoled, Peter devotes himself to writing down her teachings until he himself dies. His life story is a sort of perfect situational irony that he himself remarks on: while ostensibly a free, respectable man, he was miserable... but while a lowly prisoner (and later, asylum inmate), he was utterly happy because he had everything he wanted—his childhood home and family, forever preserved, and his beloved Mary.
That’s the book. So how does the 1935 movie compare?
It was fine. I enjoyed it. But they totally nerfed Mimsy! In the book, they love each other throughout; in the movie, they do the slap-slap-kiss-kiss thing... and also make it so Peter wins. In the movie, Mimsy doesn’t introduce Peter to dreaming true; it’s his male boss. The uncle isn’t the villain, and Mimsy doesn’t get to rescue Peter from the gallows; instead, her hubs is the villain, Peter kills HIM to rescue HER, and she weeps in the courthouse. Book!Mimsy is a roll-up-her-sleeves problem solver and Book!Peter is her #1 fan; the movie versions give all Mimsy’s best moments to someone else, sometimes Peter. Boo! Book!Mimsy forever!
The movie cuts basically all of the metaphysics, and the shared dream portion is reduced to the last twenty minutes, while the book spends the last half mostly in the dream world. The “imaginary friends of our childhood selves” aspect of the book is removed entirely, as is all the most fascinating aspects of self and imagination that I most liked. The movie is still enjoyable, but unsurprisingly, I like the book better, even though Ann Hathaway gives a great performance as Mimsy. (Gary Cooper is fine. He is a very handsome man who looks good in a period suit.)
Because the movie cuts down on the dream world and childhood portions both, it focuses way more on the star-crossed lovers angle. Which makes sense: it’s easier to film, and the book never really does anything with Mary’s husband. Giving him the villain role was a sensible choice. More interestingly, though: the movie is much sadder. Peter becomes paralyzed in an act of police brutality while in jail, and while the deceased Mary does come to comfort him, their twenty-five years of marriage is skimmed over so quickly that in practice, it feels like Peter just got Mary, only to lose her again. I understand WHY they did it like that (it is admittedly kinda weird to have “I am a prisoner for life, can never see or touch my wife in the flesh, and I feel AMAZING!” as your happy ending), but the weirdness of the book is why I like it!
It’s also kinda weird to see a book from the 1890s be more gender progressive than the movie from forty years later!
I feel like I understand why Ida Craddock liked this book so much, herself a career woman (less successful and wealthy than Mimsy) with a #1 Wife Guy as a husband who she also couldn’t corporeally be with in a way society would recognize or respect. Glad I own this.
Okay, so, I first learned of the existence of Peter Ibbetson from Leigh Eric Schmidt’s Heaven’s Bride: the Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman, a biography of a woman who married an angel in the 1890s and got harassed to death for it in 1902. According to Schmidt, “in exploring the possibility that her relationship with Soph [her husband] was all taking place on a ‘dream plane,’ Craddock drew particularly on George du Maurier’s popular novel Peter Ibbetson” (254-255). She was apparently such a big fan of the book that she recommended it to a friend in a letter: “it is a lovely poem, some parts of which are worth reading over and over again” (255). In her “diary of psychical experiences,” she also wrote that she wanted to ”master the art of ‘dreaming true,’ like Peter Ibbetson” and quotes her husband Soph as telling her, “Now, dear love, I want you to meet me in dream-life night after night, as Peter Ibbetson met his sweetheart” (255). Any story that Craddock and Soph were so interested in caught my attention, though I was reluctant to read 1800s literature.
But then I ran into it again, in Benjamin Walker’s Beyond the Body: the Human Double and the Astral Planes, a mess of a book from 1974 that nonetheless holds JUST enough gens in it that we are doomed to read the blasted thing. (Sybil came out in 1973, making this book a trove of metaphysical doubling and many-selvedness that JUST barely predates that pop culture craze, in its writing though not its publication date.) It mentions “a simple method of exteriorization is described by George Du Maurier in his novel Peter Ibbetson (1891) which portrays with a strange realism the interwoven dreams of the hero and the girl he loves... he is visited in his dream by Mary and in turn visits her by projecting his astral form from his prison cell. This he did by putting his hands behind his head, crossing his feet and then willing himself to the rendezvous. One of the subjects mentioned by Celia Green in her book on lucid dreams tells how he used the identical method described in Du Maurier’s novel. He spent one full day concentrating as far as possible on the idea of projecting himself to a certain place that night. When he went to bed he assumed the position described and immediately found himself in the street out of his body” (110). The Celia Green book he cites, Lucid Dreams, dates from 1968.
Well, son of a bitch. Two different reports from two (as far as I can tell) completely unrelated sources, roughly seventy years apart. Clearly I had to read this book.
Miraculously, the local library system still had one copy in open circulation, despite being over a century old. I read into it a bit, but then I lucked into a copy of the 1960s luxury printing from Heritage Press, which is an enormous slab of a book but that’s because Du Maurier’s beautiful illustrations (he was a cartoonist long before he became a writer) are reproduced at 100% size and also carefully placed at the proper places in the book. (The library’s older pocket size printing shrinks the illustrations considerably, and they are sometimes placed haphazardly.) Plus the Heritage Press printing comes with extra details about Du Maurier’s life and the circumstances surrounding the creation of the book. Definitely worth the cost!
So what is the book about, anyway? Like Du Maurier himself, the titular protagonist of Peter Ibbetson is a French/English man; that feeling of ethnic dislocation is a prominent theme. After an idyllic childhood in Paris with a beloved invalid playmate, Mimsy, they are separated from their beloved homes and each other after a cholera outbreak kills both of Peter’s parents and Mimsy’s mom. Mimsy travels with her loving but grieving father, while Peter is carted off by his villainous uncle, who Anglicizes Peter’s name from Pierre, forcibly bestows his own English last name of Ibbetson, and carts the boy off to London, where he’s miserable.
Nostalgia, the longing for a return to a home that no long exists, is also a HUGE part of the book. Peter escapes his nasty uncle as soon as possible to become, eventually, an architect of middling talent but zero enthusiasm. He has a lingering unhappiness he can’t put his finger on, has trouble making friends or meeting girls, and he forever longs for the Paris of his childhood, but when he returns on holiday fifteen years later, he is heartbroken to discover that of course, the place has drastically changed. You can never go home again, after all.
Or can you? He meets a beautiful, enchanting woman, the Duchess of Towers, and is startled to share a dream with her, where she teaches him the art of “dreaming true.” Neither of them think the dream is real, so imagine their surprise when they share dreams over and over, in a reconstruction of their beloved childhood neighborhood! It turns out the Duchess of Towers is Peter’s beloved playmate Mimsy! Due to their respective name changes and relocations, they’d completely lost track of each other! But alas! Though their love rekindles, she is married to a cad, and has a son. They cannot be together! So they do their best to avoid each other in the dream world. (They live in completely different places corporeally so rarely encounter each other in the “real” world.)
But then things take a strange turn. Peter discovers his villainous uncle has claimed that he is Peter’s own father... by boinking Peter’s beloved mom, the uncle’s own relation! Even in 1890s language, the story makes it clear it was NOT consensual, if it indeed happened... and while it seems unlikely, it’s not totally impossible, an ambiguity that horrifies and enrages Peter. (Peter is a man who REALLY loves his parents and his wife-to-be.) He confronts his uncle, challenges him to a duel, and when the old man tries to pull an, “Aye, ‘twas I who fucked your mother! And I’m NOT SORRY EITHER!” Peter murders him. He is only spared the death penalty by the number of people coming forward to say, “No, his uncle was a douchebag and nobody’s sorry he’s dead, he totally deserved it.” Peter’s sentence is commuted... to life imprisonment.
Meanwhile, Mary, Duchess of Towers is keeping busy. Her invalid son dies, she leaves her shit husband, and throws her considerable wealth and power to saving Peter from the gallows, and then building children’s hospitals, helping abandoned women, and other noble enterprises. Thus freed from her own romantic attachments, they embark on an epic love in the dream realm, explore the extent of that realm, travel through psychogenetic history, become their childhood selves’ imaginary friends, and have an ecstatically happy marriage, though a purely noncorporeal and nocturnal one. Mary is the one to die first, but she manages to come back to comfort Peter in his grief, and also inform him of the joys that await him... not in a Christian heaven, but in a mysterious sort of rejoining the human race’s soul gestalt, which is forever working to teach and improve itself. Thus consoled, Peter devotes himself to writing down her teachings until he himself dies. His life story is a sort of perfect situational irony that he himself remarks on: while ostensibly a free, respectable man, he was miserable... but while a lowly prisoner (and later, asylum inmate), he was utterly happy because he had everything he wanted—his childhood home and family, forever preserved, and his beloved Mary.
That’s the book. So how does the 1935 movie compare?
It was fine. I enjoyed it. But they totally nerfed Mimsy! In the book, they love each other throughout; in the movie, they do the slap-slap-kiss-kiss thing... and also make it so Peter wins. In the movie, Mimsy doesn’t introduce Peter to dreaming true; it’s his male boss. The uncle isn’t the villain, and Mimsy doesn’t get to rescue Peter from the gallows; instead, her hubs is the villain, Peter kills HIM to rescue HER, and she weeps in the courthouse. Book!Mimsy is a roll-up-her-sleeves problem solver and Book!Peter is her #1 fan; the movie versions give all Mimsy’s best moments to someone else, sometimes Peter. Boo! Book!Mimsy forever!
The movie cuts basically all of the metaphysics, and the shared dream portion is reduced to the last twenty minutes, while the book spends the last half mostly in the dream world. The “imaginary friends of our childhood selves” aspect of the book is removed entirely, as is all the most fascinating aspects of self and imagination that I most liked. The movie is still enjoyable, but unsurprisingly, I like the book better, even though Ann Hathaway gives a great performance as Mimsy. (Gary Cooper is fine. He is a very handsome man who looks good in a period suit.)
Because the movie cuts down on the dream world and childhood portions both, it focuses way more on the star-crossed lovers angle. Which makes sense: it’s easier to film, and the book never really does anything with Mary’s husband. Giving him the villain role was a sensible choice. More interestingly, though: the movie is much sadder. Peter becomes paralyzed in an act of police brutality while in jail, and while the deceased Mary does come to comfort him, their twenty-five years of marriage is skimmed over so quickly that in practice, it feels like Peter just got Mary, only to lose her again. I understand WHY they did it like that (it is admittedly kinda weird to have “I am a prisoner for life, can never see or touch my wife in the flesh, and I feel AMAZING!” as your happy ending), but the weirdness of the book is why I like it!
It’s also kinda weird to see a book from the 1890s be more gender progressive than the movie from forty years later!
I feel like I understand why Ida Craddock liked this book so much, herself a career woman (less successful and wealthy than Mimsy) with a #1 Wife Guy as a husband who she also couldn’t corporeally be with in a way society would recognize or respect. Glad I own this.
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Date: 2026-02-20 02:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2026-02-20 08:08 am (UTC)