During the time Walter Hooper was living at The Kilns in the summer of 1963 Lewis saw how the stories joined together. He drew up, for his own pleasure, ‘An Outline of Narnian History So Far As It Is Known’, which he gave Hooper. In this outline, given below, readers will note that there are, all told, 2,555 Narnian years between its Creation and its End, and only fifty-two Earthly years. It was no accident that there is no exact equivalence between Narnian and Earthly years. Lewis wanted to express not only the idea that different worlds might have different times, but that these different times might contain ‘thickness’ as well as length.
Outline of Narnian History So
Far As It Is Known
While some readers still prefer to begin their reading of the Chronicles with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Lewis had Hooper take out his notebook and he dictated the order in which the stories should be read. The order he gave was:
1. The Magician’s Nephew
2. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
3. The Horse and His Boy
4. Prince Caspian
5. The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’
6. The Silver Chair
7. The Last Battle
It is unfortunate that Lewis recorded so few of the ‘pictures’ out of which the Narnian stories grew: ‘a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion’, almost make up the sum total. The door which Aslan made in the air in Prince Caspian, and with it the Stable Door in The Last Battle, may owe something to a dream recorded in his diary on 27 April 1923. ‘I dreamed first that I was sitting in the dusk on Magdalen Bridge … then I went up a hill with a party of people. On top of the hill stood a window – no house, a window standing alone …’29 The names Caspian and Jadis were remembered from the version of the Cupid and Psyche story that Lewis was writing in verse in 1923, only here their sexes were reversed:
Now I say there was a prince
Twin brother to this Psyche, fair as she,
And prettier than a boy would choose to be,
His name was Jardis. Older far than these
Was Caspian who had rocked them on her knees,
The child of the first marriage of the king.30
The literary inspirations are even more tenuous. Again and again one can find echoes from legend and literature, ancient and modern – and those of us who have ‘read the right books’ will find more than those who have not. But such echoes are of little importance, save to suggest what books Lewis had read or to make us marvel at his wide reading and retentive memory. However much his reading may have suggested to him, Lewis can never be accused of anything like plagiarism, whatever ‘original’ researchers may find, save in trifling instances which were in any case usually subconscious.
Thus Lewis probably came across E. Nesbit’s short story ‘The Aunt and Amabel’ when it appeared in Blackie’s Christmas Annual for 1909 in which Amabel finds her way into her magic world by the same door as the Pevensies – ‘the station was Bigwardrobeinspareroom’, which is close to Mr Tummus’s ‘far land of Spare Oom … bright city of War Drobe’. But Lewis had forgotten the Nesbit story entirely until reminded of it. Occasionally echoes come through from slighter recollections: Queen Jadis’s account of her destruction of Charn and its people has a tantalizing ring of Oro’s similar description in Rider Haggard’s When the World Shook, and the passage under the eaves by which Polly and Digory get into Uncle Andrew’s study is surely a continuation of that used by Kipling’s Stalky & Co., in ‘An Unsavoury Interlude’ – though for once the illustration contradicts the text, and Lewis failed to spot it until too late.
But it is unsafe to follow such echoes far: how far was the Underland in The Silver Chair suggested by Haggard’s underground cities of Mur and Nyo – or by Joseph O’Neill’s Land Under England (1935)? Lewis might equally well have been thinking of Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus (1665) or Ludwig Holberg’s Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum (1741) – or even Jules Verne’s Voyage au Centre de la Terre (1864) and Bulwer Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871). Rider Haggard’s remark about Andrew Lang can suitably be applied to Lewis in this context – up to a certain point: ‘Whenever he sets to work to create, his wide knowledge and his marvellous memory – and little worth studying in ancient or modern literature has escaped him – prove positive stumbling blocks in his path.’ Lewis was at least as widely read and had a similar memory (‘He took in more, he felt more, he remembered more, he invented more’, said Austin Farrer at his memorial service in Magdalen)31 – but he was a creator, while Lang was seldom more than an inventor. It could almost be said that Lang used what he had read, but what Lewis had read used him – hence, like Ransom, we feel in Narnia ‘a sensation not of following an adventure but of enacting a myth’.32
‘Were all the things which appeared as mythology on Earth scattered through other worlds as realities?’33 Ransom asks himself in Perelandra, and The Chronicles of Narnia seem to be the affirmative answer to this question. For Lewis is making a new mythology that grew out of and embraced the old and gave it a new life in another world: he could no more be accused of plagiarism for introducing fauns and centaurs, dryads and hamadryads, Bacchus and Silenus and satyrs, than Homer could. Homer had the myths and legends, the lays and folk tales of the old Mycenaean world to use in the Odyssey: he probably got the Sirens from some lost lay of the Argonauts, the Cyclops from a current folk tale, and so on. But Lewis, besides the literary and legendary legacy of the ancient world, had also all that lies between it and us: he had the plenteous riches of the Arthurian Cycle – it gave him the mystic table on which lay the Stone Knife, with which Aslan was slain by the White Witch, in Ramandu’s kingdom, from the Grail Castle of the Fisher King, in the same way as the classical tales gave him the faun and the centaur. There are Talking Animals as in Aesop or Beatrix Potter or Kenneth Grahame; Queen Jadis visits late-Victorian London for one crowded hour rather as the Queen of Babylon does in Nesbit’s The Amulet; Eustace turns into a dragon rather as Maurice had into a cat or Kenneth into a carp in other Nesbit stories – but all these incidents in The Chronicles of Narnia render Lewis’s new world no less original than the introduction of playing-cards, chess-pieces, nursery rhyme and proverbial characters does in Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Indeed the technique is similar, though Lewis Carroll was inventing lands of brilliant and convincing nonsense, and C.S. Lewis lands where fantasy and adventure merge inevitably into the numinous, where vice can be disguised as Turkish Delight and Aslan can be the Narnian Christ with perfect propriety. For the Bible is, of course, the basic source-book, though most readers, even of mature age, recognize little of it except in Aslan’s death and resurrection – and Lewis intended it to be recognized only subconsciously: ‘Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons?’34
But The Chronicles of Narnia should not be treated as an allegory: they bear no literary relation either to The Pilgrim’s Progress or to The Pilgrim’s Regress, and it would spoil their effect to attempt to interpret them allegorically or symbolically – certainly for children. They are and must be read simply as stories.
As many children and adults will, however, notice the relationship between the Narnian stories and Christianity, it is probably better if we allow Lewis to be our guide. Probably the most complete explanation Lewis ever gave one of his child-readers about the ‘deeper meaning’ of the Narnian stories, and about the relationship between them, was written to Anne Jenkins on 5 March 1961:
What Aslan meant when he said he had died is, in one sense, plain enough. Read the earlier book in this series called The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and you will find the full story of how he was killed by the White Witch and came to life again. When you have read that, I think you will probably see that there is a deeper meaning behind it. The whole Narnian story is about Christ. That is to say, I asked myself ‘Supposing that there really was a world like Narnia and supposing it had (like our world) gone wrong and supposing Christ w
anted to go into that world and save it (as He did ours) what might have happened.’ The stories are my answers. Since Narnia is a world of Talking Beasts, I thought He would become a Talking Beast there, as he became a man here. I pictured Him becoming a lion there because (a) The lion is supposed to be the king of beasts; (b) Christ is called ‘The Lion of Judah’ in the Bible; (c) I’d been having strange dreams about lions when I began writing the work. The whole series works out like this.
The Magician’s Nephew tells the Creation and how evil entered Narnia.
The Lion etc the Crucifixion and Resurrection.
Prince Caspian restoration of the true religion after a corruption.
The Horse and His Boy the calling and conversion of a heathen.
The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’ the spiritual life (especially in Reepicheep).
The Silver Chair the continued war against the powers of darkness.
The Last Battle the coming of the Antichrist (the Ape). The end of the world and the Last Judgement.35
As Lewis makes clear at the end of this letter, The Last Battle is modelled closely on Our Lord’s apocalyptic prophecy in Matthew 24, but it is the end of Narnia, not this world, that Lewis is writing about. Aslan is holding his Last Judgement for that world – the entire Narnian creation. The only people from this world who are present are those who were killed in the railway accident: Digory, Polly, Peter, Edmund, Lucy, Mr and Mrs Pevensie, Eustace and Jill. The last two take an active part in the last battle; the others are reborn in the new Narnia on the other side of the Stable Door.
Susan was not killed in the railway crash, but even if she were, it is doubtful if she would have been with the others. Her interests are narrowly confined to this world and she is, of her own free will, ‘no longer a friend of Narnia’. It upsets some readers that Susan simply does not want Aslan. But Lewis was making a very serious point. He knew that many people of their own free will drift into apostasy:
The problem is not simply that of a God who consigns some of His creatures to final ruin … Christianity, true, as always, to the complexity of the real, presents us with something knottier and more ambiguous – a God so full of mercy that He becomes man and dies by torture to avert that final ruin from His creatures, and who yet, where that heroic remedy fails, seems unwilling, or even unable, to arrest the ruin by an act of mere power.36
‘The books don’t tell us what happened to Susan,’ Lewis wrote to Martin Kilmer on 22 January 1957. ‘But there is plenty of time for her to mend, and perhaps she will get to Aslan’s country in the end – in her own way.’37
The new Narnia, of which the old was only a ‘shadow’ or a ‘copy’, is a perfect example of what Lewis termed Symbolism. ‘If our passions, being immaterial,’ said Lewis, ‘can be copied by material inventions, then it is possible that our material world in its turn is the copy of an invisible world.’38 After the children have gone through the Stable Door and find themselves in the ‘real Narnia’ they are confused. What happened to the old one? ‘It’s all so different,’ says Lucy. Lord Digory then explains how ‘our material world in its turn is the copy of an invisible world’:
When Aslan said you could never go back to Narnia, he meant the Narnia you were thinking of. But that was not the real Narnia. That had a beginning and an end. It was only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia which has always been here and always will be here: just as our world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan’s real world. You need not mourn over Narnia, Lucy. All of the old Narnia that mattered, all the dear creatures, have been drawn into the real Narnia through the Door. And of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream … It’s all in Plato, all in Plato, bless me, what do they teach them at those schools!39
Lord Digory, who sounds very like the schoolboy Lewis, is referring to the greatest of Plato’s ideas about this world as a ‘Shadowlands’. It is from Book VII of Plato’s Republic that Lewis derived the notion of Heaven as the unchanging reality behind this shifting changing world of shadows, or shadowlands. It would be a pity if Lord Digory’s exasperation about modern schools did not lead the readers of the Chronicles of Narnia to read Book VII of the Republic.
And so the stories can be read and enjoyed on at least two levels: by the child who perhaps knows nothing of the Bible, of classical or Arthurian myth and legend, of any of the authors whose works Lewis knew; and by the reader who knows many at least of these and senses many more. The first has a series of enthralling adventure stories, full of magic and fantasy, and complete in themselves. The second – usually the older reader – finds an added dimension and an additional enjoyment. ‘What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.’40
‘People won’t write the books I want, so I have to do it for myself: no rot about “self-expression”,’ said Lewis in the little biography he wrote for his publishers* – unconsciously echoing Arthur Ransome’s words written ten years earlier: ‘You write not for children but for yourself, and if, by good fortune children enjoy what you enjoy, why then you are a writer of children’s books.’ The fact that both writers wrote primarily to please themselves, and that neither had children of their own or even a child audience, produces one similarity between their books – however different they are in other respects: there are no private jokes or allusions as, for example, in Alice or Pooh. There are virtually no personal ‘originals’ either: as we have seen, Lewis told Walter Hooper that the character of Puddleglum the Marsh-wiggle was modelled after his gardener, Paxford – an inwardly optimistic, outwardly pessimistic, dear, frustrating, shrewd countryman of immense integrity. In fact Puddleglum is based on Paxford but he is no nearer to being a real portrait than MacPhee is to being one of William Kirkpatrick: and these seem to be the only originals to whom Lewis admitted.
Nor apparently do the Narnian stories contain any private references, other than those with a literary flavour, such as an occasional submerged quotation or an invention like the pavender, the Narnian fish that is based on a perhaps inaccurate recollection of Warham St Leger’s humorous poem ‘A False Gallop of Analogies’. Very occasionally a personal prejudice appears a little too strongly, as in the excessive unpleasantness of the school whence Eustace and Jill escape into Narnia in The Silver Chair, or the attack on ‘civilization’ in The Last Battle which upset at least one critic when the book was published. (But Lewis added a special footnote to Green’s ‘Bodley Head Monograph’ [1963] which quoted this criticism: ‘The critic means by civilization things like big cities and offices. I mean things like justice, mercy, free speech, honour and courtesy. It is unfortunate that English uses the word in both senses.’)41
The critical reception of the seven books was varied and usually guarded. But the readers’ reception both in Great Britain and the United States, if slow at first, was enthusiastic and with a mounting and widening enthusiasm that makes them still, nearly half a century after their publication, among the most popular children’s books of the day.
The adverse adult criticism is usually caused by other than purely literary reasons; such critics may be divided roughly into the sceptics and the sentimentalists. The first attack the stories for their Christianity, the second for their presentation of some of the children as unpleasant characters – Edmund for his early treachery, Eustace before his experience as a dragon, and so on. Both are also inclined to object to Lewis’s ‘cruelty’: Aslan’s sacrifice, Eustace’s sufferings when the dragon’s hide is torn from him, Peter’s killing of the wolf, and so on. And those who dislike, for either reason, do so very thoroughly and can see few virtues in the series – even condemning them as dull and badly written, condescending, cliché-ridden, devoid of any characterization.
But vast numbers of children read the stories with delight and live imaginatively in Narnia, even acting out the stories. And very few find anything wrong unless it is pointed out to them by
‘watchful dragons’ among their elders. Most of the criticisms were answered by Lewis more or less before they were made in his Library Association lecture ‘On Three Ways of Writing for Children’, which was written at least by March 1952 when he read it to Green. (‘I think the Bournemouth Lecture was a success,’ he wrote to him on 1 May. ‘One librarian said I had almost converted him to fairy tales, he having hitherto taken the “real life” stunt for granted …’)42 As for the ‘cliché’ and the ‘condescension’ – it would be surprising if it were not possible to find any such faults in a collection of seven books by a writer, however skilled, who was venturing into an untried field and then using it to produce work which was, as a whole, new and unique in that kind. Lewis took a little time to escape from the influence of E. Nesbit (a slipshod writer as far as style was concerned, and one who delighted in clichés) and put in certain things which he considered to be part of the literary form with which he was experimenting. Green was able to suggest the quiet excision of most of these – and some of the blame must attach to him for the few that remain – though Lewis would occasionally argue cogently for their retention, and keep them.
The immense popularity of the books is also shown by the change they brought about in what were conceived to be the reading habits, likes and dislikes of children. In the years before The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, publishers returned the manuscripts of such books with the almost stereotyped form: ‘the modern child is not interested in magic and fantasy’. From 1950 onwards came the swing of the pendulum back to fantasy and fairy tale, the myth and the mythopoeic which has not yet spent itself. The best evidence is almost certainly the immense popularity not only of The Chronicles of Narnia but also Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In recent days we have witnessed the tumultuous success of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels which, while they do not share the moral depth of the Narnia tales, are further proof that children like fantasy with a clear sense of right and wrong. There has been no swing so pronounced since the publication of Andrew Lang’s first two fairy books in 1889 and 1890 ushered in the reconquest of Fairyland and the golden age of Nesbit.
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