The Admirable Crichton is a comic stage play deals with the questions of social hierarchy and personal loyalty, and with the problems of human behavior and the ordering of human society.

2. J M Barrie
(May 9, 1860 - June 19, 1937)
Early Literary Work
1. Writer, playwright J.M. Barrie was born on May 9, 1860 in
Kirriemuir, Forfarshire, Scotland.
2. After graduating from Edinburgh University in 1882, Barrie worked
as a journalist.
3. He published his first novel, Better Dead, in 1887.
4. Barrie soon had a string of popular novels set in Scotland,
including A Window in Thrums (1889).
5. After success with fiction, Barrie began writing plays in 1890s.
6. His play, Walker London, was warmly received. The comedy poked
fun at the institution of marriage.
7. He got married in 1894 to actress Mary Ansell, but it didn't turn out
to be a happy union. (The couple later divorced.)
8. Perhaps to escape his difficult home life, Barrie took long walks in
London's Kensington Gardens, where he met the five Llewelyn
Davies brothers in the late 1890s.
9. He found inspiration for his best-known work—Peter Pan—in his
friendship with the Davies family. (Barrie would later become the
boys' guardian after death of their parents.)
Sir James Matthew Barrie was a Scottish dramatist, best known
for the play Peter Pan.

3. Peter Pan
1. The famous character of Peter Pan first
appeared in the 1902 book The Little White
Bird.
2. Two years later, his play Peter Pan premiered
on the London stage, became success.
3. Barrie also wrote a book based on the play
called Peter and Wendy, which was published
in 1911. The book earned raves from critics.
Later Work
1. After Peter Pan, Barrie continued writing
plays aimed at adults.
2. Several of his later works had a dark element
to them.
3. The Twelve-Pound Look (1910) offers a
glimpse inside an unhappy marriage
and Half an Hour (1913) follows a woman
who plans on leaving her husband for
another man, but she decides she must stay
when her husband severely injured in a bus
accident.
4. His last major play, Mary Rose, was
produced in 1920 and centred on a son
visited by his mother's ghost.
Death and Legacy
1. J.M. Barrie died on June 19,
1937, in London, England.
2. After his death, Barrie's beloved
characters were transformed
into animated figures in the
Disney classic Peter Pan (1953).
The story was also the basis for
the 1991 film Hook.
3. Barrie's most famous play
continues to be a favourite with
young and old alike.

4. J. M. Barrie: The Admirable Crichton (1902)
Genre: Play.
Country: Scotland.
J.M. Barrie's The Admirable Crichton
is the work of a son of a Scottish weaver,
born in a tiny low-built house a few miles
from Glamis Castle, where the writer
would later come to entertain members of
the Royal family at Princess Margaret's
fourth birthday party.
For Barrie the English upper classes
were an endless source of fascination
and humour – the ideal target for his
social satire, beneath the veneer of
which lies a greater, philosophical
exploration of the nature of society,
civilization and the will-to-power.
The idea for the play may have been
prompted by Arthur Conan Doyle,
who suggested to Barrie that if a king and
an able seaman were wrecked together on
a desert island for the rest of their lives,
the sailor would end as king and the
monarch as servant.
The title was borrowed from
James Urquhart about the
accomplishments of James
Crichton as “The Admirable
Crichton”

5. Barrie began jotting down ideas on this
theme in his notebooks under various working
titles including “The Island” and “The Case is
Altered”.
Like so many of his plays, The Admirable
Crichton is built around altered circumstances,
and considers how identities change when placed
in different environments.
The elaborate stage directions with three or
four pages at the beginning of acts– establish
another characteristic of Barrie's drama.
There are many different versions of The
Admirable Crichton that were staged during his
lifetime.
Much of the dialogue and commentary of The
Admirable Crichton adopts a teasing
relationship with its audience, making its
statements and provoking its ideas indirectly.
About the play:
The Admirable Crichton is a comic stage play
deals with the questions of social hierarchy and
personal loyalty, and with the problems of human
behavior and the ordering of human society.
Barrie's suggestion that the British social
structure might be flawed, that the lords and ladies
might in some ways be inferior to mere servants,
seemed subversive to Barrie's audience, and caused
minor sensation.
The theatre-going public saw his portrayal of
weak, foolish aristocrats as a critical attack on the
British social system. The play causes no such
sensation today in the democratic United States. But
the theme of the natural selection of leaders is
found in the most ancient works of literature and is
as relevant today as when Barrie's play was first
performed.

6. Characters
1) William (Bill) Crichton - the butler to the earl of Loam
2) The Earl of Loam - Crichton’s liberal master & a widower
3) The Hon. Ernest Woolley - a nephew of the earl of Loam
4) Lady Mary - the eldest daughter of the earl of Loam
5) Agatha and Catherine - younger daughters of the earl of Loam
6) Lord Brocklehurst - Lady Mary has chosen to be her husband
7) Rev. John Treherne - athletic young clergyman
8) Tweeny - maid
9) Rolleston - the valet to the earl of Loam
10)Lady Brocklehurst - Lord Brocklehurst’s mother
11)Fisher - Lady Mary’s maid

7. Characters Discussed
William (Bill) Crichton
William (Bill) Crichton, the butler to the earl of Loam. Stuffy, honest, and efficient, Crichton has
one complaint about his master: He is not contemptuous enough of his inferiors.
While in England, Crichton believes that the established social order is absolutely correct.
Stranded on an island, however, he believes in the natural selection of leaders.
When everyone realizes how efficient he is, Crichton takes command; he is stern, fair, and almost
regal in his deportment.
The Earl of Loam
The Earl of Loam, a peer of the realm and Crichton’s liberal master. In theory, the earl believes in
the equality of all members of society. Once a month, he has his servants in for tea. When he has an
opportunity to practice his theories in fact, he becomes an ardent believer in the supremacy of the
aristocracy.
When the yachting party of which he is host is cast away on a Pacific island, he proves completely
ineffectual. For a time, he is his pompous self, until he realizes his utter incapability of leading the
stranded party.
After Crichton assumes command, the other castaways call him ‘Daddy,’ and he seems quite happy
doing odd jobs around the camp.
Lady Mary
Lady Mary, the oldest daughter of the Earl of Loam. A part of a
useless aristocracy, she is haughty, proud, and languorous. After the
shipwreck, she shows herself to be adaptable and courageous. Unlike her
former self in England, she becomes a useful member of the island
society. The hunter of the group, she has the opportunity to wait on the
“Gov.” (Crichton). If a rescue ship had not arrived, she would have been
chosen to become Crichton’s wife.

8. The Hon. Ernest Woolley
The Hon. Ernest Woolley, a nephew of the earl of Loam and a maker of brilliant epigrams. Ernest is
a cheerful, egotistical young man about town with enough shrewdness to avoid work entirely. In London,
he idles away his time making witty remarks.
Soon after being stranded on the island, however, his talent for wit gets him into trouble with
Crichton, now the leader of the party.
With every epigram that Ernest makes, Crichton dips his head into a bucket of cold water, thus
curing Ernest of a useless habit. Proving him to be very adaptable, he becomes a diligent worker. After
returning to England, however, he reverts to type, and between epigrams he manages to write a book
about his island experience, making himself the hero of the adventure. In the book, the contributions of
the rest of the party, including Crichton, are dealt with summarily.
Characters Discussed
Agatha and Catherine
Younger daughters of the earl of Loam. After
being on the island for a time, they also learn to do
things for themselves, and no longer do they depend
on maids to answer their every whim. At first, the
lack of domestic help is trying to them.
Lord Brocklehurst
Lord Brocklehurst, the man
Mary has chosen to be her husband.
He is a complete nonentity, a
mother’s boy, humourless,
pompous, correct, cold, and useless.
Tweeny
Tweeny, in England the “between”
maid. When the earl of Loam decrees
that the three sisters can have only one
maid among them, she goes with them,
mainly to be near Crichton. On the
island, she proves to be a useful helper.
Lady Brocklehurst
Lady Brocklehurst, Lord
Brocklehurst’s formidable,
domineering mother. After the
return of the seafarers, she
tries to learn what really
happened on the island.

9. Once every month, the philanthropic Earl of
Loam gives expression to his views on human
equality by forcing his servants to have tea
with him and his family in the great hall of
Loam House in Mayfair.
It is a disagreeable experience for everyone
concerned, especially for his butler, Crichton,
who does not share his master’s liberal views.
Summary
Lord Loam alone enjoys the occasion, He
orders his daughters and his nephew to treat
his servants as he treats them.
Lady Mary, his oldest daughter, is a spirited
young woman who resents her father her
indignation reaches a climax when Lord Loam
announces that his three daughters are to
have one maid among them on a yachting trip
on which the family is about to embark.
Lady Mary is furious, but she assumes that
her maid, Fisher, will go along. When Fisher
learns it, she promptly resigns.
Lord Loam is left without any servants for his
projected cruise, for his valet also resigns. Crichton
finally agrees, out of loyalty to his master, to act as his
valet on the trip.
He persuades Tweeny to go along as maid to Lord
Loam’s daughters.
The cruise ends unhappily after 2 months
the yacht (Blue Bell) is pounded to pieces
during a violent storm in the Pacific, and
the party is cast away on a tropical island.
On the island all try to preserve as much
as possible the class distinction that
prevailed in England, but the attempt is
unsuccessful.
Crichton alone knows
exactly what he is doing,
and it is upon him that
the others must depend.
Crichton, the servant,
becomes on the island
the natural leader.
The aristocrats worry over the rising
authority of their former butler and
the decline in their own prestige.

10. Summary…
When Lord Loam appears, after washing ashore with
some wreckage, they urge him to take a stand of
authority.
Crichton takes full advantage of his newly acquired
authority. Sharing none of the earl’s ideas about
equality.
Under Crichton’s rule the aristocrats are happy for
perhaps the first time in their lives.
The greatest change occurs in Lady Mary.
She alone realizes that in any environment
Crichton is superior to them all.
Consequently she falls in love with
the butler and does everything in her
power to make herself his favourite.
Lord Loam’s only recourse is to remove his little party
to another section of the island apart from Crichton.
Hunger, which the aristocrats by their own efforts
cannot assuage, brings them meekly back. Crichton
becomes the acknowledged leader of them all.
Lord Loam, dressed in animal skins, is merely
a harmless and rather genial old man with no
particular talents, whom everyone calls Daddy.
Crichton, attracted to the beautiful Lady Mary,
considers making her his consort on the island.
But after the rescue (Two years later, Lord
Loam and his family return to their old habits
of thought and behaviour.
Crichton is again the butler. Ernest
writes a book about their experiences
on the island and makes himself the
hero of their exploits. Crichton is
barely mentioned.
She expresses her
view that something
might be wrong with
England, Crichton
tells her that not even
from her will he
listen to a word of
criticism against
England or English
ways.
Lady Mary still recognizes
Crichton’s superiority and tells
him so frankly.

11. Places Discussed
Loam House
Home of the earl of Loam in London’s
Mayfair district—one of the most expensive
districts of London, where the cream of the
English aristocracy maintained their town
houses in the days before World War I.
Loam House contains several reception
rooms of varying quality, some of which are
to be “lent for charitable purposes,” while
those reserved for private use are lavishly
furnished.

12. Island
A mill wheel erected on the stream
provides the cabin with electric light.

13. Setting
The play opens in late nineteenth-century London, in
a drawing room at the house of the Earl of Loam.
Lord Loam has invited family members and
guests to take tea with his household servants.
The topic of conversation
focuses on an upcoming
trip aboard Lord Loam's
yacht Bluebell. Loam, his
three daughters, his
nephew, and a clergyman
are to make the sea voyage.
The second and third
acts occur on a deserted
island in the Pacific.
The castaways build a comfortable
house lit with electricity and
construct devices to signal any ship
that might pass.
The final act returns the action to
Lord Loam's drawing room, where
mementoes from the island—skins,
stuffed birds, and hunting
weapons—decorate the walls.
After Crichton tell Lady Mary that he
has in no way changed his faith in the
natural order of things, he turns the
light out and the play ends.

14. As a work of art, The Admirable
Crichton is simple, consistent, and
complete. Formally, it is dramatic
comedy with a rather unusual twist at
the end
Literary Qualities
Crichton and Tweeny are obviously
members of society with whom the
audience is meant to sympathize.
On the island, life suddenly becomes
more fundamental. A new society
crystallizes, with the morally correct
character as leader.
The old, unreasonable rules have been
replaced by more natural rules in a more
significant society.
Tweeny, the illiterate young servant,
grows from being speechlessly shy in the
presence

15. Social Sensitivity
 The Admirable Crichton deals with a single social problem: the
natural selection of leaders in any society.
 Women are viewed as neither inferior nor superior to men.
 Lady Mary is easily the brightest, most competent woman in the
play; and although her hunting ability surpasses that of Crichton,
she does not quite match his talents generally.
 Tweeny, on the other hand, although illiterate, is easily a match
for the men who pursue her; she quickly sees through Ernest and
refuses his marriage proposal.
 The Admirable Crichton criticizes a society where leaders are
selected on the basis of heredity rather than on the basis of ability.

16. Themes and Characters
The characters in The Admirable Crichton fall
into two categories: masters and servants.
Crichton Crichton who is best able to provide for the group's
survival. He can start a fire, build a shelter, hunt,
fish, and cooking short, he can deal with this new
environment.
Crichton invented an electrically controlled
device to set signal fires all around the island,
signals the ship to their rescue.
To be an indoor servant at all is to
Crichton a badge of honour.
Lady Mary
The only one of the three sisters whose character
Barrie develops, is more like Crichton.
She is perceptive, strong-willed,
and somewhat haughty.
On the island, Lady Mary becomes
the best hunter of the group.
Although betrothed to Lord Brocklehurst, she wins
Crichton's heart and accepts his marriage proposal.

17. Lord Loam
Themes and Characters…
The radical earl who insists upon
equality between noble and servant
classes in London, is of no value as a
leader on the deserted island.
On the island he discards a hairpin in London he had no
use for such things. Crichton points out, a hairpin could
have been very useful in such a primitive place.
He is washed overboard during the shipwreck because
of his ineptitude.
Tweeny
Tweeny's name comes from her social status: she is
neither the upstairs maid nor the kitchen maid, but
kind of a helper in between.
In London Tweeny is illiterate, shy,
and speechless around her betters;
but on the island, her skills and her
pragmatism make her superior .
Ernest
Nephew to Lord Loam, is a self-centred young man,
who, while entertaining enough in a London drawing
room, is a time-wasting bore in the more primitive
society of the island.
Crichton has to soak Ernest's head in buckets of
water to teach him not to spew forth endless
epigrams.
Become a productive member of the island family
under the strict guidance of Crichton.

18. The play's
theme is
expressed
several
times
througho
ut the
action.
Lady Mary chides him for his assertiveness. He responds,
"My Lady, I disbelieved in equality at home
because it was against nature, and for that same
reason I as utterly disbelieve in it on an island."
The butler tries to explain that absolute equality is unnatural. He is a
butler, not a nobleman; he cannot act like a nobleman, nor does he
want to any more than he would like to act like a lower-class servant.
On the island, when Crichton becomes
aware that away from civilization the nobles
are useless as leaders, he begins to overrule
some of their futile, dangerous orders.
Since Crichton, the only one who knows
how to build a fire is cooking a pot of
stew, the former rulers all return to sit
at the feet of their new master, the one
among them who can provide food.
Following their rescue, all return to their old social positions. Lord Loam is once
again the master, Ernest the self-centred playboy, and Crichton the butler.
What makes Crichton ‘admirable’ is his devotion
to the principles of nature.
Crichton is selfless enough to disregard himself
for the greater good of principle.
Themes and Characters…

19. Critical Evaluation
One of the best of Sir James Barrie’s comedies
The Admirable Crichton was based in the
make believe games he played with them,
in which fantasies of being cast away on a
deserted island played a major part.
The immediate inspiration for The
Admirable Crichton was Barrie’s
relationship with the four sons of Arthur
Llewellyn Davies.
The games were fuelled by his memories of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe
(1719) and of such boys’ books derived from Defoe’s work as Johann Rudolf
Wyss’s Der schweizerische Robinson (1812-1827; The Swiss Family
Robinson, 1814, 1818, 1820) and R. M. Ballantyne’s Coral Island (1858).
In all these tales the resourcefulness of the heroes invariably allows
them to establish a comfortable lifestyle, thereby demonstrating the
superior nature of British civilization.
The title of the play is as ironic as its contents.
The original Admirable Crichton, a sixteenth century Scots adventurer
who died in a brawl at the age of twenty-two, is immortalized in Thomas
Urquhart’s Ekskubalauron (1652).
As a Scotsman from a poor background, Barrie was acutely aware of the
delusions of the well-off Londoners among whom he had come to live.

20. Critical Evaluation…
The silliness that moves along the plot is not as casually
satirical as it seems; a depth of bitter feeling in it
becomes increasingly apparent .
Crichton, makes an obsession out of knowing his place
and insisting that one’s rank reflects one’s worth.
Crichton is a dutiful servant, but when the castaways
are cut off from society, his true self emerges.
Ability to see things as they are and to apply his
common sense to them—which fits Crichton for the
leader’s role on the island—is exactly the same ability
that fits him to be a butler.His common sense sends him straight back to his
former station when the party returns to Mayfair.
A last inversion in the plot is Lady Brocklehurst’s
interrogation of Crichton, who contrives to answer all
her questions truthfully while giving a completely
false picture of what actually transpired on the island.
Barrie inserts a gratuitous (and inaccurate)
note that “the man who could never tell a
lie makes no answer.”
The author carefully leaves it to the audience to make
up their mind what he means by that remark.
Crichton, as an honourable and
admirable man, cannot refuse to
fire the beacons that enabled his
companions to be restored to
their place in society.
The audience is likely to wish Crichton good luck—but one
does have to bear in mind the fate of the man after whom
Crichton is named. Barrie took the title from the sobriquet
(nick name) of a genius and athlete James Crichton.

21. THANK YOU
S. Mohan Raj M.A., M.Phil, B.Ed.,
Assistant Professor,
Indo -American College, Cheyyar.
Available @ : 9751660760
E-mail: rajmohan251@gmail.com