Peter Pan
Peter Pan is probably the best know piece of literature about escapism
back to childhood. It substitutes the endless world of childhood for
the inevitability of growing up, with its attendant loss of innocence
and magic. Peter Pan is kind of space orphan – a virtual creation
symbolising the childhood of all and every one of us and its mix of
adventure and helplessness, where the infant hero has not yet outgrown
his need for mothering and someone to “do the spring cleaning”:

“As you look at Wendy, you may see her hair becoming white, and her
figure little again, for all this happened long ago. Jane is now a
common grown-up, with a daughter called Margaret; and every spring
cleaning time, except when he forgets, Peter comes for
Margaret and takes her to the Neverland, where she tells him stories
about himself, to which he listens eagerly. When Margaret grows up she
will have a daughter, who is to be Peter's mother in turn; and thus it
will go on, so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless.”
At the same time as embodying gaiety and innocence, however, Peter Pan
lives in the “heartless” world of the child, where adventures carry
within them the darker more cruel sides of the child’s primitive fears
– dangerous animals, imprisonment, pursuit by frightening hordes – and
the wish of the child to take on these demons and fight them. As an
exploration of the archetypal child’s unconscious, the book – like all
great literary creations – has some innate realism in that it is rooted
in human experiences and emotions, but the idea of never growing up is
purely escapist. Barrie admits as much in the first sentence of his
book, and in so doing introduces his creation: “All children, except
one, grow up.” The justification for his fantasy is not long in
following: “Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, "Oh, why
can't you remain like this for ever!"

As in all the typical escapist classics, the “real” world is a humdrum
place inhabited by frighteningly boring people. Mr Darling’s reaction
to having children is a farcical criticism of those who put money above
life itself: "I have one pound seventeen here, and two and six at the
office; I can cut off my coffee at the office, say ten shillings,
making two nine and six, with your eighteen and three makes three nine
seven, with five naught naught in my cheque-book makes eight nine seven
–“ His inhuman reaction at the birth of Wendy and his calculations
whether to keep her or not are just as heartless as anything in Peter
Pan’s world: “and so on it went, and it added up differently each time;
but at last Wendy just got through, with mumps reduced to twelve six,
and the two kinds of measles treated as one.”
Barrie starts in foggy, habit bound London, a mundane world peopled by
awful adults that you long to fly away from, and then keep on going.
The escapist imagination in Peter Pan is like the layers of the onion
in Peer Gynt, or the layers of time in the Time Bandits, as in the
description of Wendy’s mother: “Her romantic mind was like the tiny
boxes, one within the other, that come from the puzzling East, however
many you discover there is always one more”.

The lure of escapism is that wherever the frontier is, we can always go
past it, wherever the future lies, there is always another future
beyond it. It is like the riddle of the infinity of infinities – a
Hilton Hotel of the Skies where even if the infinite number of rooms it
contains are filled with an infinite number of people, there will
always be room for the nocturnal traveller or the busload of virtual
tourists. In the world of Peter Pan there will always be room for one
more child....... In the world of children’s escapist fiction there
will always be room for the next Harry Potter.
(Evans A. "This Virtual Life" 2003)