Eight Children in Narnia. Jared Lodbell
of their understanding convinces me that I have been wrong on points where we disagree: the one exception, the work of Michael Ward, will be noted much later on, though not at any great length.
For me, the first knowledge that C.S. Lewis was writing what turned out to be the Narnia series came in Chad Walsh’s little 1949 book, C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics, in which he mentions that Lewis was writing a children’s book “after the manner of E. Nesbit.” By the time I got around to checking out E. Nesbit (which was actually quite a while later), The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe had already appeared, and I had been given a copy—and it was a long time before I made the acquaintance either of E. Nesbit’s (Edith Nesbit Bland’s) Bastables or of her Five Children (as in The Five Children and It). Yet that phrase “after the manner of E. Nesbit” echoes in my ears, made clearer a few years later when I read in A Preface to Paradise Lost the words Lewis used to describe Milton’s question in making his decision to write Paradise Lost: “to which of the great pre-existing forms of literary creation, so different in the expectations they excite and fulfill, so diverse in their powers,” is this designed to contribute?
Perhaps a children’s book “after the manner of E. Nesbit,” is not an ideal qualifier as one of the great pre-existing forms of literary creation, but it was a pre-existing form back in 1948–49, and it remains true that “the first qualification for judging any piece of workmanship, from a corkscrew to a cathedral, to know what it is” (C.S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost, Oxford 1942, pp. 1–2). After all, Lewis had made a conscious decision to write a children’s story of a particular kind, with a particular genealogy—that was the first important thing I knew about The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, even before the name of the book, even before the name of the world or the country, and it remains important. And by the way, on the matter of names, we should note that—in common parlance—the name of the world is Narnia and the name of the country is Narnia. (We get to the “origins” of Narnia, the name, later on in this Introduction, and in Chapter 3.) Archenland on the borders of Narnia (the country) is part of the world of Narnia, but not the country. If I were to be given permission to write Narnian books as a kind of sequel to Lewis’s, they would be the Chronicles of Archenland—but that is unlikely to happen. (And it would have to be Archenland largely apart from Lewis’s “Outline of Narnian History” in Past Watchful Dragons.)
In Chapter 1, we will look at Lewis’s conscious decision to write a children’s story, beginning with what “a children’s story” meant to him, looking first at his childhood and childhood reading, and why he thought such a story might say best what was to be said! We will examine the children’s story (and at “boys’ books”) from 1898 to (say) 1950, and then we’ll look at another point, at Lewis’s boyishness. (In the early part of the period, we’ll look especially at G.A. Henty, Kenneth Grahame, E. Nesbit, Rudyard Kipling.) On this other point—Professor Claude Rawson has spoken of Lewis as the “schoolboy [Dr.] Johnson” and we will ask, in line with that, whether he wasn’t still in some sense that schoolboy even at the age of fifty when he began the Narnia books, trying (he said) to write “corking good yarns” (to use the slang of his youth) and all that. (And given his statement that the author of children’s books writes from what he shares with the child, Lewis’s schoolboy attitudes may be a kind of strength in his children’s books.)
But on this matter of a collection of books like the seven beginning with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe “saying best what’s to be said,” we might look briefly here (more in Chapter 1) at what Lewis said about the reason(s) he wrote the Narnia books (in the New York Times Book Review in 1956, collected in On Stories, 1982, pp. 45–47): He is speaking of Tasso’s distinction between the poet as poet and the poet as citizen, and remarks that there are the Author’s reason for writing an imaginative work and the Man’s reason. The story material bubbles up in the Author’s mind—in Lewis’s case invariably beginning with pictures in his mind. But this gets one nowhere “unless it is accompanied by the longing for a Form” that completes the Author’s impulse. The Man must then ask “how the gratification of this impulse will fit in with all the other things he wants and ought to do or be.” He applies this then to his own “fairy tales,” where (a famous passage) he remarks: “Everything began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn’t even anything Christian about them; that . . . pushed itself in of its own accord . . . part of the bubbling.”
Then it becomes apparent that the Form will be that of the “fairytale” (though it is scarcely a traditional fairy tale), and then the Man becomes aware that this form will enable the Author to “cast all these things [the basic Christian truths presumably being among these things] into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency. Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could. That was the Man’s motive. But of course he could have done nothing if the Author had not been on the boil first.” It looks as though he was trying to do more than simply write corking good yarns, and that is where we go in Chapter 2, looking at his creation of Narnia (the country or world—less the name), and what went into it. And what went into it begins with his (and his brother Warnie’s) created world of Boxen (Animal-Land and India), and the Ulster world they were growing up in, in the very early years of the twentieth century.
India, in the Boxonian combined world, was the creature of Grandfather Hamilton’s sojourn there (his diary out, in the days before the Sepoy business, is in Volume I of the Lewis Papers, along with other diaries, including the Crimea) and perhaps still more of the Henty books whose mise-en-scène is India or thereabouts: With Clive in India, The Tiger of Mysore, At the Point of the Bayonet, On the Irrawaddy, To Herat and Cabul, Through the Sikh War, Rujub the Juggler, In Times of Peril, For Name and Fame, Through Three Campaigns. Animal-Land has perhaps more complicated origins: the timing is not certain, but there seems to have been a shift from contemporary (1906) to medieval (or “knights-in-armor”) Animal-Land about the time Conan Doyle’s Sir Nigel was appearing in instalments in The Strand. India, of course (Warnie’s realm), might have very different knights and very different armor—but, like contemporary Animal-Land, it is fundamentally a political entity. If anyone doubts that Animal-Land is a creation out of Punch, by way of Edward Lear (or perhaps the other way around), then through Victorian illustration generally, let him (or her) look at the young C.S. Lewis’s illustrations of the early Boxonian play “The King’s Ring” (Boxen, p. 29) and of the later “Boxen, or Scenes from Boxonian City Life” (Boxen, esp. pp. 64–65, 69, 86).
These are, in short, pretty much the dressed animals of Punch or the Nonsense Writers like Lear and Carroll (and C.S. Lewis’s father was something like a character out of Punch), and even the human beings are comic creations (General Quicksteppe, for example). The dialogue has music-hall (comedy-routine) overtones—in fact, in “Boxen, or Scenes from Boxonian City Life,” Viscount Puddiphat is serenaded with “Oh Mister Puddiphat / Where did you get that ha-at?” followed by “Now down D street we will go / That’s the place for us, you know / Whoop! [Whoop! Whoopee!]” The only way in which this can be seen as a forerunner or antecessor (certainly not greatly an ancestor) of Narnia is in its illustrating the early furniture of Lewis’s mind. And particularly, it is interesting that at the age of nine he is systematizing the history of Animal-Land from 55 B.C. (sic!) to 1212—a more interesting date than 1215 to an eight-year-old, I suppose, the year 1215 being England’s Magna Carta to go with England’s Julius Caesar in 55 B.C.—and then 1377 (the latest date in the sketch), the death date of England’s Edward III. The only well-known English date missing (before the fifteenth century at least) is 1066.
My point is that these stories seem to be constructed from the materials available to the pre-schoolboy C.S. Lewis at his parents’ house and in his parents’ lives at Little Lea, reflecting the interests of the house and those lives, and while the stories are illustrated, their sources seem to be literary rather than visionary. But then, perhaps the connection is closer than we might think, for if Narnia “all began with a picture,” we can reasonably ask, from what book or story did the picture come? And we will. We will also look then at the Ulster world