This book is not intended to be iconoclastic, but I will try to be realistic, not only because reality is more interesting than fantasy, but also because we do Lewis no honour to make him into a plaster saint. And he deserves our honour.
Clive Staples Lewis was born on 29 November 1898 in the city of Belfast. More than most men, he was the product of his upbringing and ancestry. Throughout his adult life he remained constantly preoccupied with his own childhood. Moreover the companion of his infancy, Warren Hamilton Lewis, his elder brother by three years, lived with him for the greater part of his life. Their comradeship outlasted the vicissitudes of love and friendship.
But C. S. Lewis did more than carry the memories of his childhood in Northern Ireland into grown-up life. Many of his most robustly distinctive qualities were manifestly ones of inheritance.
It is always tiresome for a child to be told by older relations that his personal characteristics are the results of genetics. It implies that the child is no more than a collection of bits – one grandfather contributing the nose, another the golfing handicap, an aunt on the mother’s side contributing the ear for languages or the eye for painting. Surely the child must feel he is more than the sum of his ancestors’ parts. And indeed C. S. Lewis was very much more than a mixture of Hamilton and Lewis chromosomes. When we turn back to the close of the nineteenth century, however, and meet Lewis’s grandparents and parents, the family likenesses are too overwhelming to miss.
Lewis’s mother was Florence Hamilton, always known as Flora. Her father, Thomas Hamilton (1826–1905), was a bluff Church of Ireland clergyman whose father had been the Rector of Enniskillen and whose grandfather, the Right Reverend Hugh Hamilton, had been the Bishop of Ossory. C. S. Lewis and his brother were rather proud of this episcopal ancestor. They had more ambivalent feelings about their grandfather when they read his surviving writings and papers. He had been a naval chaplain in the Baltic during the Crimean War and he was well travelled in Europe. But his copious travel journals were repulsive to Warren, partly because of their ‘constant and irritating employment of outworn literary cliche’, but more because of ‘his intense religious bigotry, which was not … palliated as being in the spirit of his age’.
Among the beliefs which the Reverend Thomas Hamilton shared with a high proportion of Protestants in Northern Ireland was the idea that the Roman church was ‘composed of the Devil’s children’. Indeed he doubted whether it was possible for a Roman Catholic to be saved. What was so typical of Thomas Hamilton, however, was that he managed to sustain this belief for four years as Anglican chaplain in Rome. While he was there he wrote a long essay entitled ‘What saith the Scripture – an Inquiry of what it is that the Bible teaches concerning the future state of the Lost’. Hamilton advanced the interesting view that, in effect, only the saved survive. When the Bible says that the damned suffer eternal punishment it must mean punishment eternal in its effects. They do not go on suffering continuously. They are snuffed out, they cease to be. Precisely similar preoccupations were to haunt the mind of Thomas’s grandson, Clive Staples Lewis, when he came to write his theological reflections.
While Thomas Hamilton was living in Rome, incidentally, something occurred which entered into family legend and eventually formed a seed for C. S. Lewis’s most famous story. Hamilton’s daughter Flora – C. S. Lewis’s mother – was then a little girl. One afternoon she and some grown-ups escaped the scorching heat of the pavement by walking into a church. Under one of the altars there was the body of a saint lying in a glass case. While no grown-up was looking, Flora distinctly saw this figure open her eyelids. Just as when Lucy comes back from the other side of the wardrobe and discovers that everyone thinks Narnia is a product of her imagination, so the Hamiltons failed to believe in Flora’s ‘miracle’. The difference between Flora and Lucy was that Flora did not herself believe that she had witnessed anything miraculous. ‘I thought it was done by cords pulled by a priest behind the alter [sic].’ Nevertheless, the pattern of the story – a little girl who has seen a wonder in which the rest of her family refuse to believe – is structurally the same as that of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
After their spell in Rome, the Hamiltons returned to Ireland and Thomas Hamilton became the Rector of St Mark’s, Dundela, on the outskirts of Belfast, a position which he occupied until his retirement in 1900 (he died in 1905). St Mark’s is an impressively large church designed by the Tractarian architect William Butterfield. By the subdued standards of the Church of Ireland, it is rather ‘High’.
Those who knew Thomas Hamilton, while being a little overwhelmed by his theological pugnacity, were fond of his company. He was flawlessly eloquent, and he was no ascetic. He had a love of hearty eating and drinking, and was addicted to jaunts, his favourite occupation being walking tours with male friends. He could be thunderingly tactless, but he had a heart of gold. His daughter Flora was an intelligent young woman who had gained an honours degree in mathematics at the Queen’s University, Belfast – an unusual achievement for a woman in those days.
In 1894, Thomas Hamilton at length consented to give his daughter’s hand in marriage to a solicitor in the Belfast police courts called Albert Lewis. ‘Rarely has a Jacob served more arduously for his Rachel than did Albert,’ Warren Lewis was to write about his parents’ courtship. ‘And many years afterwards he frequently recited with indignant amusement the various embarrassments which he suffered on those trips.’
Perhaps one reason why the Reverend Thomas Hamilton had doubts about Albert Lewis was that he was only just a gentleman. ‘His grandfather’, C. S. Lewis remembered, ‘had been a Welsh farmer, his father, a self-made man, had begun life as a workman, emigrated to Ireland and ended as a partner in the firm of Macilwaite & Lewis, ‘Boiler makers, Engineers and Iron Ship Builders’.1 What we do not learn from Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis’s spiritual autobiography, is that grandfather Lewis, like grandfather Hamilton, was a fluent writer. Richard Lewis was not just an engineer or a businessman. When he was working for the Cork Steamship Company he spent his evenings reading papers to the men on such subjects as ‘A Special Providence’ and ‘On Jonah’s Mission to Nineveh’ and ‘Whether man will or no’. Richard Lewis wrote, ‘God’s purposes, whether of justice or mercy shall be carried out … True, God has threatened the sinner, but from the character the Bible gives of Him, His threatenings are all to be applied conditionally. His will is that all shall be saved … ’
Richard Lewis did not only write theological essays. He also made up primitive science-fiction stories to amuse his children – stories, for example, in which a Mr Timothy Tumbledown advertises for ‘a good telescope that will show the inhabitants of the moon life size. Also a selenographical machine to enable the undersigned to construct an aeronautic cable from Tycho to Vesuvius as he is anxious to find out the different geological strata of the moon.’
Once again, here are characteristics for which C. S. Lewis was conspicuous latently present in one of his grandfathers. He, like Richard Lewis, was a man whose idea of a good evening’s entertainment was reading a paper on Free Will and Divine Providence and whose private delight was in children’s literature and scientific fantasy.
Albert Lewis, the son of Richard and the father of our subject, is one of the most important characters in the story. He was a ‘character’, and that in two senses. First, he was a strongly marked and in many ways eccentric individual, highly imaginative, bombastic, literate and eloquent. But secondly, and much more confusingly, Albert Lewis also became a ‘character’ in literature. Anyone who has read Surprised by Joy will recognize the portrait of C. S. Lewis’s father as a comic masterpiece. When we turn back from Surprised by Joy to the Lewis family papers we find not that C. S. Lewis has exactly speaking lied about his father but that he has left so much out of the picture and painted it from a position of such uncontrollable prejudice that it is something