The majority of readers and writers are agreed in finding the practice of literary exhumation somewhat distasteful. Among them we may count Geraldine McCaughrean, whose Peter Pan in Scarlet hits the bookshops of 32 different countries today, nearly 70 years after the death of JM Barrie, the evergreen hero's original creator.

McCaughrean, interviewed on this morning's Today programme, referred to her early ill-ease with the project, but explained that the charitable cause - a portion of the proceeds from sales of the book are going to Great Ormond Street children's hospital - tipped the balance of cons and pros in favour of the latter. No doubt there were other items to place on the list of pros.

She also explains, in an interview in today's Daily Telegraph, the reasoning process which allowed her own sympathies to cross from con to pro:

"Would I mind if someone wrote a sequel to one of my books? I asked myself, and I decided that I wouldn't, providing that the writer was respectful, had read my book first and wasn't drunk when doing it."

McCaughrean's no doubt honest appeal to that staple of practical ethics, the code of do as you would be done by, seems to me to be insufficient (though, to his credit, Jesus never thought of protecting that perennially hot piece of intellectual property). Whether Geraldine McCaughrean, Great Ormond Street, or the publishers "should" have done what they've done is beside the point. The question seems rather to be one of whether we should want them to have done it. Are we just being childish when we want to "read on", and does it matter if we are?

There are, of course, hundreds of examples of fictional characters being recycled long after their author's death. Indeed, it was partly in anticipation of the glut of second-hand Peters, Tinkerbells and Captain Hooks likely to crawl out from the paperwork when the author's copyright comes to an end next year that the Barrie Estate's owners and managers - the Great Ormond Street hospital - decided to commission an "authorised" update on life in Neverland. And if, following the open competition whose eventual winner was McCaughrean, they can be accused of milking Peter Pan for its already very substantial worth (from cinema as well as book and theatre sales), then being a charity surely makes the moneyspinning project a duty as well as a right.

So is the now-threatened consensus on this kind of aesthetic necrophilia grounded in anything more substantial than "bad taste", the authority of which as an impediment to action has in any case long been on the wane? Or is it something we should all just get over, especially where there's charity at stake?

I'm sure the experience of wanting to know a little bit more of what our favourite fictional entities are up to is familiar to us all, as is that of acknowledging such interests to be rather regressive. Did Pemberley flourish under Mrs Darcy (née Bennett)? Does Robert Maitland ever leave the M25 traffic island on which J G Ballard leaves him stranded in the novella Concrete Island? Apparently, it is even common practice to write to authors seeking reassurance that X lived happily ever after, or that Y couldn't really have died - could she?

Fascinating as the responses to such questions may be - whether "authorised" or otherwise - they are all extraneous to the original text, the beginning, middle and ending of which answers not to the whims of readers, nor even to those of authors, but to standards of aesthetic or rhetorical coherence over which we have limited control. The freedom and power of imagination we have to engage with fictional characters is only increased by our ceding authority to the text in this respect. For a certain amount of time, the boundaries of a text remain open, in a sense, to the possibility of credible expansion into sequel territory; but when, as in this case, nearly a hundred years of cultural and literary development have left us far from Barrie's Edwardian style and world - one in which, moreover, the modern concept of childhood to which Barrie was so attached was relatively new - you have to say that the window of opportunity is very tightly shut indeed. Trying to force it open it only compromises the integrity of the original.

So does it matter? Perhaps reassuringly, it only really matters in so far as one really cares. That is to say, it only matters if you accord the original with sufficient artistic integrity in order to think it worth not damaging. Cases such as the numerous exhumations of the characters from, say, Pride and Prejudice you can safely brand as childish and, were they to be taken as a serious contribution to the original story, compromising to Austen's work.

In the present case, the project may still be a childish one, but since we are dealing with what is, after all, a children's book - albeit a canonical one - that's probably half the point.