Lewis observed in 1932 (in a letter to Arthur Greeves) that when he wanted light reading, he wanted “not so much a grown-up ‘light’ book (to me usually the hardest of all kinds of reading) as a boy’s book.” Did he ever put away childish (or schoolboyish) things? I think so—and then he took them down again from the shelf—corking good yarns and all that. Claude Rawson noted (in the Times Literary Supplement, August 11th–17th 1989) that “Lewis’s enduring delight in the worlds of epic and saga almost certainly included a sense of their deep analogy to what Horace Walpole called the ‘mimic republic’ of schoolboys.” The matter is complicated by the fact that some of Lewis’s adult style came early in his life: Rawson adduces the following interchange at the age of eight, on returning from a holiday in France. Lewis “announced that he had ‘a prejudice against the French.’ When his father asked why, he replied, ‘If I knew why, it wouldn’t be a prejudice.’”
The point is, Lewis in his youth was in many ways very adult, and very like himself as an adult. A few years ago, Ruth James Cording put a little book together, C.S. Lewis: A Celebration of His Early Life (Nashville, 2000), based on materials at the Wheaton College Library. She quotes (p. 19) the famous statement by his tutor, W.T. Kirkpatrick, to Lewis’s father: “Outside a life of literary study, life has no meaning or attraction for him. You may make a writer or a scholar of him, but you’ll not make anything else.” But before we get to Lewis in his mid-teens, we can look at him earlier. When he was only a year and seven months old, his older brother was sniffling, and the young Lewis turned to him and said, “Warnie wipe nose!” (p. 53). The next summer (he was two-and-a half), his mother took him into a toy store to buy a “penny engine” and the woman asked if she should tie a string to it. He replied indignantly (p. 56), “Baby doesn’t see any string on the engines Baby sees in the station.” This was before he grew tired of being Baby or Babbins and, not liking the name Clive, pointed to himself and said, “He is Jacksie” so that ever after he was first “Jacks” and then “Jack” Lewis. But in both these stories he is speaking in the third person.
That’s another “childish thing” he did not put away—his friend Owen Barfield more than once remarked (both in print and to me) that some of Lewis’s poems were along the lines of “this is a thing a man might say” rather than “I say.” And also, as we noted earlier, as one other “childish thing” he did not put away, it is claimed that the wardrobe through which Lucy found Narnia was the wardrobe at the house called Little Lea, where the Lewis family moved in 1905. Indeed, his cousin Ruth Hamilton later told how they would sit in the wardrobe with Jack telling stories. That certainly may be true, and the Pevensies’ scurrying into the wardrobe to avoid “grown-ups” in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, has an air of reminiscence about it.
But the stories would not have been stories of faerie but of Animal-Land, or possibly Boxen. The origins of the trip through the wardrobe lie elsewhere, I think. Here is a passage from an essay in Time & Tide in 1946 (in On Stories, p. 121): “It was more as if a cupboard which one had hitherto valued as a place for hanging coats proved one day, when you opened the door, to lead to the garden of the Hesperides.” And here is a passage from George MacDonald (Phantastes, 1858, Schocken ed. 1982, p. 5), which has—to me—quite a bit of the inside-to-outside feel of Lucy’s entering Narnia:
I saw that a large green marble basin . . . which stood on a low pedestal of the same material in the corner of my room, was overflowing like a spring; and that a stream of clear water was running over the carpet . . . And stranger still, where this carpet, which I had myself designed to imitate a field of grass and daisies, bordered the course of the little stream, the grass-blades and daisies seemed to wave in a tiny breeze . . . My dressing table was was an old-fashioned piece of furniture of black oak with drawers all down the front. They were elaborately carved in foliage, of which ivy formed the chief part. . . . on the further end a singular change had commenced. I happened to fix my eye on a little cluster of ivy-leaves. The first of these was evidently the work of the carver; the next looked curious; the third was unmistakable ivy. . . . Hearing next a slight motion above me, I looked up and saw that the branches and the leaves designed upon the curtains of my bed were slightly in motion.
One of the childish things Lewis left behind him was his childish imitation of his father’s world of Ulster, for which he substituted, in adulthood, the world of faerie. Ruth Cording suggests that he read Henry Van Dyke’s “The Blue Flower” in childhood, and it’s true that he reports in Surprised by Joy, that he was a “votary of the Blue Flower”—a Romantic—before he was six years old (p. 7). I know of no place where Lewis mentions Van Dyke (1852–1933), and of course Van Dyke’s “The Blue Flower” in The Blue Flower (1902) is directly from Novalis (1772–1801). Nevertheless, I think it likely this was the version he first read, if he read it as a child, and one may, I suppose (if one searches), find echoes in Lewis’s writing of the other stories in this collection of Van Dyke’s. In any case, there is little doubt that his mother read Kingsley’s Water-Babies (1867) to him when he was very young, though he did not recall it till he re-read it in adulthood—Water-Babies being Colin Manlove’s candidate for the book that invented Modern Fantasy. Lewis’s childhood was clearly not entirely lived in the workaday political world of Ulster and Boxen, and it was the Ulster and Boxen part he largely put aside, not when he became a man so much as finally when he became a Christian.
The “Ulster” novel Lewis was writing in the 1920s is evidence that he was not yet working in the realms of faerie—which, if we read his diaries from 1922 to 1927 (All My Road Before Me), is exactly what we should expect. Let me re-echo here what I said before, that we really have relatively little evidence of what Lewis was like as a child. He loved railroad engines and trains (expected), got up early to see the trains pass (I did the same, aged five), wanted to be outside to play even in the rain (expected), liked to go in the water at the seaside or lakeside (expected but not entirely usual), read whatever he could get his hands on (until and if he decided he did not like it), spoke of himself in the third person (not expected!), was already a systematizer and historian (of his imaginary Boxen), had a thumb with only one joint so was—he says—clumsy in handwork (except drawing, painting, and writing), lost his mother when he was nine (and his grandfather Lewis also).
One of the stories in The Strand in 1908 was the classic “The Fog” by C. Morley Roberts (1857–1942). I have read “The Fog” more than once, most recently to see if there was any influence on Lewis—beyond what may be an obvious influence on “The Man Born Blind.” I have seen none in Narnia. But note that The Strand is not a magazine for boys nor a fantasy magazine, and its stories not stories for boys or (mostly) fantasy stories, any more than Conan Doyle or Morley Roberts were writers of boys’ books. But they wrote books boys read, and certainly the tone of “The Fog” is very much the tone of early H.G. Wells (which may or may not be fantasy, depending on how we define fantasy). Let’s pause here and summarize this chapter.
We have looked at Lewis’s decision to write a children’s story, beginning with what “a children’s story” meant to him. We have looked at Lewis’s childhood and his childhood reading, and why he thought such a story “may say best what is to be said!” We looked at the children’s story (or boys’ books), especially at Thackeray, G.A. Henty, Andrew Lang, Kenneth Grahame, E. Nesbit, John Buchan. On this other point—Professor Claude Rawson has spoken of Lewis as the “schoolboy [Dr.] Johnson” and we have asked, in line with that, whether he wasn’t still in some sense that schoolboy even at the age of fifty (or maybe a bit earlier) when he began the Narnia books. And we have looked at what from his Ulster and Boxen childhood he kept and what he put aside when he came to his adult years.
The children’s book has a number of lines of descent, but one begins with the Christmas book and particularly Thackeray’s Christmas books, and among them particularly his last, The Rose and the Ring (1854). This is comical and fantastical, and perhaps written over the children’s heads to the adults behind, but not quite, and, of course,