No fairytale: what happened to the real children behind fiction’s best-loved characters?

Peter Pan, Christopher Robin and Alice in Wonderland … being the star of a classic story might seem like a dream, but there’s a dark side, argues the author of The Children I’d loved the children for years before discovering they were real. I can almost summon the magic I felt when I first saw the photographs that proved it: the little boy clad in an approximation of hunters’ skins, posing victorious. The dark-haired girl with the offset gaze, her interior expression that of a person just gro...

By Melissa Albert