Barrie studied at the University of Edinburgh and spent two years on the Nottingham Journal before settling in London as a freelance writer in 1885. His first successful book, Auld Licht Idylls (1888), contained sketches of life in Kirriemuir, and the stories in A Window in Thurms (1889) continued to explore that setting. The Little Minister (1891), a highly sentimental novel in the same style, was a best seller, and, after its dramatization in 1897, Barrie wrote mostly for the theatre. His autobiographical novels When a Man’s Single (1888) and Sentimental Tommy (1896) both feature a little boy in Kirriemuir (“Thrums”) who weaves a cloak of romantic fiction between himself and reality and becomes a successful writer. Most of those early works are marked by quaint Scottish dialect, whimsical humour and comic clowning, pathos, and sentimentality.
