There is much more I would like to quote (I can in my mind hear my father reading this to me when I was young), but this will do. One point here—this is not severely restricted description.
Let us look now at a children’s writer Lewis certainly did not read as a child. George MacDonald’s Curdie books—The Princess and the Goblin (1871, collected 1872) and The Princess and Curdie (1877, collected 1883)—came to my attention when I was thirteen through a reference in Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. The Princess is Irene, who is eight in the first book and nine in most of the second, and she is not unlike Alice. Curdie is a miner’s son, of no particular age (but recognizably a child), who rescues Irene (more than once, and there’s more to the story than that, but that will do as summary). The King in the Curdie books, and especially in The Princess and Curdie, lives on bread and wine (this was the reference in That Hideous Strength), and the two books are, like much of MacDonald’s work, sacramental and symbolic, rather than allegorical. In them the passage of time, though not the time itself, was important to MacDonald—that is part of his appreciation of differences in age. Think of Princess Irene’s great-great-grandmother in The Princess and the Goblin (as summarized by Professor Roderick McGillis in his Introduction to the World’s Classics edition of the Curdie books, 1990, p. xiii): “She [the great-great-grandmother] does not hesitate to present the child with difficult ideas. She tells Irene that she is ‘her father’s mother’s father’s mother,’ and Irene responds: ‘Oh, dear! I can’t understand that.’ The [great-great] grandmother then remarks: ‘I didn’t expect you would. But that’s no reason why I shouldn’t say it’.”
This is a key to a new appreciation of childhood that came in Albert Lewis’s time as a child (though I daresay it passed him by). The child cannot, it is true, understand the adult world, nor should the child be expected to. The child does not have adult attitudes, nor should the child be expected to—at least, not as a child. Whether he should be expected to grow into them is not clear—MacDonald doesn’t think much of most adults, except the simple ones. From this perception (and perhaps from some intermixture of Rousseauvian virtuous savagery amidst the consciousness of Arcadia) comes the cult of the child, the Wise Child to replace or complement the Wise Woman or Wise Man, the Wise Child seen (though with the complication of dumbness) in its purer Scots form in George MacDonald’s Sir Gibbie, and then later in its bowdlerized and sentimentalized form with Little Lord Fauntleroy.
The Curdie books are not the less a pastoral for their being a miner’s pastoral. If they differ technically from Grahame’s pastoral, it is chiefly in having an omniscient narrator rather than a (now-omniscient) recollector, and that is not important for us. Perhaps I should briefly recount what happens in the books, though here we are verging on dream rather than plot. We begin (in The Princess and the Goblins) with the Princess Irene, eight years old, in the absence of her King-Papa, exploring caverns below the castle, finding the goblins (or being found by them), and being rescued by Curdie Peterson, that is Peter’s son, Peter being a miner. Curdie keeps returning to the mines in the caverns (or perhaps they are caverns in the mines) by night to earn extra money to buy his mother a red petticoat. Irene explores the castle and finds the room of her great-grandmother (or is she great-great-or even more?), at the top of the castle as the mines and the goblins are at the bottom. Meanwhile Curdie searches out the goblins, as much out of curiosity as anything else. Eventually Irene goes back to the caverns, Curdie rescues her again, returns her to her father, and the narrative more or less breaks off, not to be resumed for a decade. The book obviously influenced Lewis, especially—I think—in his caves and mines and most especially in the whole creation of the Gnomes and the Land of Bism. It has additional importance in the history of the development of German Romanticism out of Novalis, but that is not our story here. And, by the way, The Princess and Curdie is something of a different matter.
That is, Curdie rescues Irene and her King-Papa, but this time in a war with the neighboring kingdom of of Borsagrass, aided by the Uglies, including the dog Lina, who are really good and human, against the people of Gwyntystorm, whose hands he can feel to be bestial. There are more city pavements here than in The Princess and the Goblins, and it is Curdie who meets—and is given tasks by—the Grandmother. Eventually Curdie marries the princess and after the old king’s death, they become king and queen. But they have no heirs, and the people of Gwyntystorm elect a king who goes on mining the precious metals under the city until the city collapses (Oxford World’s Classics ed., pp. 341–42): “One day at noon, when life was at its highest, the whole city fell with a roaring crash. The cries of men and the shrieks of women went up with its dust, and then there was a great silence. Where the mighty rock once towered, crowded with homes and crowned with a palace, now rushes and raves a stone-obstructed rapid of the river. All around spreads a wilderness of wild deer, and the very name of Gwyntystorm has ceased from the lips of men.” (“Heavy!” as one young reader remarked to me some years ago.)
And, as an aside (more or less on what we consider “age-appropriateness”), we have that late Victorian favorite, G.A. Henty. Though the young C.S. Lewis apparently did not enjoy reading Henty, there is certainly evidence that he read him. Also, the young W.H. Lewis read and enjoyed him. Here is a specimen passage from the first Henty book I ever owned (Bravest of the Brave or With Peterborough in Spain, London 1887):
Hitherto his [Peterborough’s] life had been a strange one. Indolent and energetic by turns, restless and intriguing, quarreling with all with whom he came in contact, burning with righteous indignation against corruption and misdoing, generous to a point which crippled his finances seriously, he was a puzzle to all who knew him, and had he died at this time [1704] he would have only left behind him the reputation of being one of the most brilliant, gifted, and honest, but at the same time one of the most unstable, eccentric, and ill-regulated spirits of his time. (p. 19 of the Chicago M.A. Donohue edition)
Besides being a first-rate description of a manic depressive, this gives an idea of the expected vocabulary and comprehension of the fourteen-year-olds to whom, so far as we know, Henty’s books were directed. “Heavy!”
But they were certainly “corking good yarns!” In fact, G.A. Henty’s books were the measure of the “corking good yarn” in Lewis’s youth, though C.S. Lewis, who used the phrase, did not like them. The fact is, his taste was for “unreal estates” as his brother’s was (like Henty’s) for the real and historical. Since John Buchan’s Prester John (1910) had an influence on Lewis, whenever he read it, we might now turn to that book:
There were only two outlets from that cave—the way I had come and the way the river came . . . I sat down on the floor and looked at the wall of water. It fell . . . in a solid sheet, which made up the whole of the wall of the cave . . . I began the climb [and] almost before I knew I found my head close under the roof of the cave . . . Just below the level of the roof [was] the submerged spike of rock . . . To get to my feet and stand on the spike while all the fury of the water was plucking at me was the hardest physical effort I have ever made . . . a slip would send me into the abyss . . .
And so, until
after hard striving and hope . . . deferred, I found myself on a firm outcrop of weathered stone. In three strides I was on the edge of the plateau. [I stumbled] a few steps forward on the mountain turf and then flung myself on my face. When I raised my head I was amazed to find it still early morning . . . (Prester John, Popular Library ed., NY, n.d., pp. 230–34)
After a certain age, Lewis did not often openly confess his tastes, until he was older and then, I think, made them part of his persona as the “schoolboy [Dr.] Johnson”—perhaps we might look here at his great model. Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) is not so well known now as he used to be, apart from (or even perhaps including) students of English literature. He was a Conservative (“Tory”) and Church of England scholar, essayist, literary historian, Christian apologist, versifier and occasional poet,