Quality Street is a comedy in four acts by J. M. Barrie, written before his more famous work Peter Pan. The story is about two sisters who start a school "for genteel children".
Illustration of Seymour Hicks as Valentine Brown
Terriss and Hicks in Quality Street
Maude Adams as Phoebe in the 1901 Broadway production
Sir James Matthew Barrie, 1st Baronet, was a Scottish novelist and playwright, best remembered as the creator of Peter Pan. He was born and educated in Scotland and then moved to London, where he wrote several successful novels and plays. There he met the Llewelyn Davies boys, who inspired him to write about a baby boy who has magical adventures in Kensington Gardens, then to write Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, a 1904 West End "fairy play" about an ageless boy and an ordinary girl named Wendy who have adventures in the fantasy setting of Neverland.
Portrait by Herbert Rose Barraud, 1892
Barrie in 1892
Some of Barrie's novels
Peter Pan statue (1912) by Sir George Frampton in Kensington Gardens, London