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The Conscious Decision to Write a Children’s Story

So let us take up this matter of the “conscious decision to write a children’s story” in somewhat greater detail. We’ll begin with Lewis’s childhood and his childhood reading, and here he has carved part of the way for us, in his memoir, Surprised by Joy. What is a little curious about that memoir is his relative indefiniteness as to the books that greatly influenced his childhood. It’s true that he records how the idea of Autumn came to him (Surprised by Joy, p. 16) from Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin (1903), which he could easily have read at the “appropriate” age, and which may have come into his life at the same time as the toy garden he mentions in Surprised by Joy (p. 7). That was the toy garden which gave him the first idea of the beauty of nature. But there is little or no trace of Beatrix Potter in his dressed animals in Boxen. As he records, the mood of the systematizer was already strong in him—not the mood of the Romantic. That was the eighteenth-century mood of Swift or Defoe, the Medieval mood of Lydgate or Aquinas (or earlier Isidore of Seville)—not the Romantic mood of the century into which he was born.

He read Conan Doyle’s Sir Nigel (he doesn’t mention The White Company) and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court for its Arthurian story, not for its “vulgar ridicule”—but better was E. Nesbit’s trilogy, Five Children and It (1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), The Story of the Amulet (1906). “The last did the most for me. It first opened my eyes to antiquity, ‘the dark backward and abysm of time’” (Surprised by Joy, p. 14—though he doesn’t have all the original titles quite right in the book—The Phoenix and the Wishing Carpet, for example). And then “Gulliver in an unexpurgated and lavishly illustrated edition was one of my favorites, and I pored endlessly over an almost complete set of old Punches which stood in my father’s study. Tenniel gratified my passion for dressed animals . . . Then came the Beatrix Potter books, and then at last beauty” (pp. 14–15).

After that came Tegner’s Drapa in the Longfellow version, and that is where his story of his childhood reading ends, at least in Surprised by Joy. One might say, “But that is quite a lot about his reading as a child—you said there was very little.” But there is no mention of Lewis Carroll or Edward Lear, no mention of popular books at the time (barring Sir Nigel, in parts in The Strand). Nothing else mentioned of Conan Doyle’s, though much more was available to him in The Strand. The Longfellow was his father’s (and there was Tennyson also), I believe, but of his father’s favorites, Trollope (for example), he says little—possibly he didn’t read them until later. He apparently did not have The Boy’s King Arthur, or Dasent’s East of the Sun and West of the Moon, or Heroes of Asgard (though one writer, Ruth James Cording, says he did have that one). And he did not read George Alfred Henty’s books for boys (or not with pleasure), though his brother “Warnie” (W.H. Lewis) did.

From his account (and from reading Boxen), one is left with the conclusion that the great neglected pieces of C.S. Lewis’s mental furniture from his childhood (neglected by the critics and historians) were Gulliver’s Travels and the back files of Punch. The importance of Punch we mentioned in the last chapter; the importance of Gulliver (as I have pointed out in my book on The Scientifiction Novels of C.S. Lewis) may be greater for the Ransom stories (especially Out of the Silent Planet) than for Narnia—but it is still there for Narnia. And also, because of his negative comments on Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome, the importance of the Lays has been underrated. What all these portend, when we put them all together, we will see in our final chapter, which I have called (for the pun) “A Good Swift Kick toward Success.”

The curious thing about his childhood reading, as he recounts it, is how little of it was books that other children of his time seem to have read—but against this we may set his choice (for the “Book Club” as noted in a letter home 22nd November 1908) of The Strand (with Warnie getting Pearson’s and “Field The Captain”). We know he read Sir Nigel in The Strand, though we have no evidence he read Sherlock Holmes. A study of The Strand from, say, 1905 (perhaps earlier) to 1910 or 1911 or even 1912 might well be of considerable value here (Pearson’s and The Captain less). In The Strand, E. Nesbit, H.G. Wells (“The First Men in the Moon” in 1901), W.W. Jacobs, Morley Roberts (“The Fog” in 1908), Arthur Conan Doyle, Somerville and Ross (The Further Adventures of an Irish R.M.), even (in 1901) Lewis Carroll, all come to mind.

In fact, it may be suggested that much of Lewis’s childhood reading, apart from the books—including bound volumes of Punch—at Little Lea, was determined by what was in The Strand. And yet, he certainly exercised choice—Sir Nigel, but not, apparently Sherlock Holmes, or at least not with anything like the same interest. (Though certainly he was aware of Sherlock Holmes, as The Magician’s Nephew shows, and his father enjoyed detective stories.) We know Lewis read Somerville and Ross (from his description of meeting Somerville’s nephew Nevill Coghill), though we don’t know whether he read their books when he was young (but Further Adventures of an Irish R.M. were in The Strand in 1906.). Many of the classic children’s stories that were among Lewis’s favorites in later life—The Wind in the Willows, for example—do not seem to have been an important part of his own childhood. Certainly George MacDonald only came into his ken when he was sixteen, and then not with the Curdie books or At the Back of the Northwind, not with the children’s books. So in a way, Lewis’s experience with children’s books—apart from the Strand experience—was like mine with his children’s books, with the Narnia books. We were reading not as children but as adults, in a way, though not the same way, reading critically. (Lewis may have read The Wind in the Willows early on, but it was clearly not so important to him as E. Nesbit.) But what could children’s books say best? (Because it was “children’s books” for all he said “fairy-tales.”)

Actually, his remark indeed was that a fairy-tale “may say best what is to be said!” He pointed out in that connection that he was using the phrase “fairy tale” and not the phrase “children’s stories” though it might seem children’s stories were, in fact, what he was talking about. But he was (he said) bowing to his friend Tolkien’s demonstration that the connection between children and fairy-tales was not as close as was generally thought—so his Narnia books were fairy-tales, and were “‘for children’ only in the sense that I excluded what I thought they would not like or understand” (On Stories, p. 47). He goes on:

As these images [faun with umbrella in the snow, queen on a sledge, magnificent lion] sorted themselves into events (i.e., became a story) they seemed to demand no love interest and no close psychology. But the Form which excludes these things is the fairy tale. And the moment I thought of that I fell in love with the Form itself [my emphasis]: its brevity, its severe restraints on description, its flexible traditionalism, its inflexible hostility to all analysis, digression, reflections, and ‘gas.’ I was now enamored of it. Its very limitations of vocabulary became an attraction; as the hardness of the stone pleases the sculptor or the difficulty of the sonnet delights the sonneteer. (pp. 46–47)

I have emphasized Lewis’s statement that he fell in love with the form when he came to begin writing the Narnia books, because it suggests that he was not previously enamored of the form, which may be important for us. I have not emphasized the severe constraints on description or the difficulty of using the form delighting the user, the first because I’m not sure of its relevance, the second because I am not sure the experience is universal.

Not all fairy-tales—not even all of Grimm’s fairy-tales—eschew description, and it is certain neither E. Nesbit nor the Narnia books show the fairy-tale restraint. But let us look briefly at that restraint in two of Grimm’s lesser-known tales, both of which begin with a descriptive passage, “Master Pfriem” and “The Little Folks’ Presents”—the first begins “Master Pfriem was a short, thin, but lively man, who never rested a moment. His face, of which his turned-up nose was the only prominent feature, was marked by small-pox and pale as death; his hair was grey and shaggy, his eyes small, but they glanced perpetually about on all sides” (Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales, Doubleday, n.d., p. 395). “The Little Folks’ Presents” (p. 155) begins:

A tailor and a goldsmith were traveling together, and one evening when the sun had sunk behind the mountains, they heard the sound of distant music, which became more and more distinct. It sounded strange, but so pleasant that they forgot all their weariness and stepped quickly onwards. The moon had already arisen when they reached a hill on which they saw a crowd of little men and women, who had taken each other’s hands, and were whirling round in the dance with the greatest pleasure and delight.

One is reminded of the example I have read of how economy in description can be a great strength—“They came out of the castle by a gate toward the sea, and the moon shown clear.” The point is that we, the readers (or listeners), bring our experiences, or images, or vision, to give descriptive substance to the simple words, and by our co-operation, our being part of the process, what is described becomes more real to us. But while this is certainly true of the fairy-tales in Grimm (though in differing degrees as they are from different sources), it may be less true of Narnia, as it is less true of E. Nesbit.

Here is a description of the Dance of Plenty from Prince Caspian (p. 205):

Then Bacchus and Silenus and the Maenads began a dance, far wilder than the dance of the trees; not merely a dance for fun and beauty (though it was that too) but a magic dance of plenty, and where their hands touched, and where their feet fell, the feast came into existence—sides of roasted meat that filled the grove with delicious smell, and wheaten cakes and oaten cakes, honey and many-colored sugars and cream as thick as porridge and a smooth as still water, peaches, nectarines, pomegranates, pears, grapes, strawberries, raspberries—pyramids and cataracts of fruit. Then, in great wooden cups and bowls and mazers, wreathed with ivy, came the wines; dark, thick ones like syrups of mulberry juice, and clear red ones like red jellies liquefied, and yellow wines and green wines and yellowy-green and greenish-yellow.

In one sense, of course, there is economy in this description—much of it is by nouns and there are a couple of simple similes. But it is scarcely the restricted description under severe restraint of the fairy-tale (though of course what it is describing isn’t restrained either). And here, for comparison, is a passage from one of E. Nesbit’s books:

“I see” said the Queen, “a sort of play-thing. Well, I wish that all these slaves may have in their hands this moment their fill of their favorite meat and drink.” Instantly, all the people in the Mile End Road, and in all the other streets where poor people live, found their hands full of things to eat and drink. From the cab window could be seen persons carrying every kind of food, and bottles and cans as well. Roast meat, fowls, red lobsters, great yellowy crabs, fried fish, boiled pork, beef-steak puddings, baked onions, mutton pies . . . (E. Nesbit, The Story of the Amulet [1906], in Octopus ed., 1979, pp. 515–16)

The Queen here is the model for the Empress Jadis in The Magician’s Nephew, but the point here is that severe economy of description in the fairy-tale mode is no more a characteristic of E. Nesbit and the Five Children (Robert, Anthea, Jane, Cyril and “The Lamb”) than it is of C.S. Lewis and the Four Pevensies—even though there is a kind of restraint imposed by restrictions on vocabulary for the proximate audience. And what of the other point Lewis made in his “Fairy Tales May Say Best What’s to Be Said” is the pleasure in conforming the artist’s creation to a strict form, his example (besides the fairy tale) being the sonnet?

I think I see what he is getting at, though I am not sure it is the way I would put it (but I may not have his point quite right). Certainly there is a pleasure in playing the creation against the form, as Lewis does with the novel in Perelandra—or as I have done in writing sonnets (not very expert ones)—but a difficulty in exact conformity seems to me something apart from the creative process. I recall that when A.E. Housman spoke of difficulty in the creative process (in his lecture on “The Name and Nature of Poetry”), he carefully concealed which lines in the poem in question had come easily and which with difficulty. I suggest that Lewis’s excitement with the form was part and parcel of his love for epigram, for “short-form” fiction (short story or story in instalments), and for certainty—as in (for example—it is G.K. Chesterton’s example) The Song of Roland, where “Païens ont tort et Chrestiens ont droit!”

“Short-form” fiction and certainty are part of the “children’s story” or the “fairy-tale” mode. One other point here—a person writing a sonnet can feel part of the great tradition gathered about that form, as indeed can anyone using an established form: that is part of what Lewis was talking about when he was talking about John Milton’s decision to write a secondary epic. And that can serve as inspiration. I believe Lewis was inspired to further creation by his writing in the manner and tradition of E. Nesbit, rather as Andrew Lang had been inspired in Prince Prigio by writing in the manner and tradition of Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring. One other thing might be mentioned here (we’ll take it up in a subsequent chapter in talking about the watchful dragons) a matter frequently overlooked, I think, in the discussion of such fairy-tale collections as the Grimms’—which is, just how Christian (in many ways) many of them are.

We will not look here at the whole history of children’s books from Lewis’s birth (or before, since there were older books in the house) to his final creation of Narnia, but a few glances over the field should be useful, remembering that while Lewis read children’s books after his childhood years, the books he read were mostly ones that were like those of his childhood years, or even books from those years (or close to them). He did not read The Wind in the Willows (or E. Nesbit’s Bastable stories) until he was in his late twenties (On Stories, p. 33), but we may reasonably include in our look both The Wind in the Willows (1908) and the Bastable stories—and even John Buchan’s boy’s book Prester John (1910), which left its mark on Perelandra and possibly on The Silver Chair. Whether he read Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) or Rewards and Fairies (1910) is open to doubt—though we know he read Kipling “on and off all my life,” as he said (in “Kipling’s World” in They Asked for a Paper, London 1962). Instead of looking at the history of the children’s story from, say, 1898 to 1950, let us concentrate on two of Lewis’s immediate antecessors, two we know he read (Andrew Lang and E. Nesbit in her “Psammead” stories), and then on Kenneth Grahame, with a few words on John Buchan.

We turn first to Andrew Lang, with Prince Prigio (1889) and Ricardo of Pantouflia (1893), where W.M. Thackeray’s earlier mixture of satire and high spirits in The Rose and the Ring has given way to Lang’s sophistication and inward smile. Or almost so—for the fact is, Lang is in some ways better than he tries to be. On this matter of satire and high spirits in The Rose and the Ring, one of Thackeray’s Christmas books—there are five of these, published as a collection in The Christmas Books of Mr M.A. Titmarsh, in 1887 and 1891 and 1897 in Thackeray’s Works. I know Our Street (the second in the collection) was first published in 1848 and The Rose and the Ring (the last) in 1854. They are written for children, in the manner of children’s books of the time, we would say, except that (barring John Ruskin’s The King of Golden River) we have no children’s books of the time much beyond Sunday School tracts—and none of these really provide Thackeray with the model either for The Kickleburys on the Rhine (1851) or The Rose and the Ring, or The History of Prince Giglio and Prince Bulbo (1854).

We will look briefly here at The Rose and the Ring. In the midst of wars and rumors of wars, at Christmas-time in 1854, Thackeray (under the name M.A. Titmarsh) gave to the world, as his Christmas book for that year, The Rose and The Ring, in which—it will be recalled—the first chapter “Shows How the Royal Family Sate Down to Breakfast” and opens with the words “This is Valoroso the XXIV, King of Paflagonia, seated with his Queen and only child at their royal breakfast-table, and receiving a letter which announces to his Majesty a proposed visit from Prince Bulbo, heir of Padella, reigning King of Crim Tartary” (p. 1). Of course, a letter from Crim Tartary would appropriately arrive at an over-groaning board (notice the number of egg-cups in front of the Queen), and we should keep in mind, as we tread warily through the Italianate names of Thackeray’s fable, that King Bomba of the Two Sicilies (Ferdinand II, 1810–1859) had been headline and breakfast-table news in England for a dozen years in 1854, and would be for nearly half a dozen more.

So had been the Russians and the Poles, and the Russians were fighting the British in the Crimea (home of the Crimean or Crim Tartars)—though it is uncertain whether it is this, or a recollection of Marshal Kutusov in the Napoleonic Wars forty years before, that has given us Count Kutasoff Hedzoff (pp. 27ff). The point is that Thackeray’s Christmas-book is in part a topical satire. All these foreigners are faintly ridiculous—and some, like Bomba, are quite ridiculous and also cruel and evil and illiberal (it is a very English view)—so if we are to write about ridiculous people who are also cruel, we will write about foreigners. But note that the edge of the edged weapon, and the recognition of the satire, comes from a knowledge of what was going on in 1854: it does not inhere in the book itself. What does inhere in the book is a certain magic, a classical fairy-tale pattern (the lost princess), the character of the Fairy Blackstick, and the tearing high spirits of the whole performance. “‘Well, hang the prince.’ ‘I don’t understand you,’ says Hedzoff, who was not a very clever man. ‘You Gaby! He didn’t say which Prince,’ says Gruffanuff.

It is far from accidental that The Rose and The Ring was published as a Christmas Book, and indeed the Victorian—and particularly the early Victorian—institution of Christmas is one of the few examples of Victorian carnival. And even later, there were the great English Christmas parties given (among others) by Friedrich Engels in the last decade of his life. In his story of Scrooge, as certainly in his earliest work, Dickens enters that realm of carnival, of bouleversement, of suspension of normal rules: the very name of Scrooge has the sound of carnival, and while the story is comedic (in Northrop Frye’s sense), it is told very much in the comic vein. Of course, it too is a Christmas book. These Christmas books existed before Victoria’s reign, but they are essentially an early Victorian phenomenon. We may briefly look at some of Thackeray’s (or Titmarsh’s) own remarks on the phenomenon of Christmas books. After all, these Christmas books are one part of the creation of children’s literature. The quotations given here are from his “About a Christmas Book” from Fraser’s in December 1845 (Vol. 32, pp. 744–48), and from his “A Grumble about Christmas Books” in Fraser’s in January 1847 (Vol. 35, pp. 111–126).

From the first comes the following, in the persona of M.A. Titmarsh to Oliver Yorke, Esquire: “Do you not remember, my dear fellow, our own joy when the 12th came and we plunged out of school, not to see the face of Muzzle for six weeks?” (p. 744). And again, of the Christmas-book illustrators, “Messrs. Cope, Redgrave, Townsend, Horsley, &c., who go back to the masters before Raphael” (p. 745). And again, “Mr. Tenniel’s ‘Prince and Outlaw’ represent a prince and outlaw of Astley’s . . . the ballads to which the pictures are appended are of the theatrical sort, and quite devoid of genuineness and simplicity” (p. 748).

And from the second come these, also in a letter from M.A. Titmarsh to Oliver Yorke, Esquire:

I have read Christmas books until I have reached the state of mind most deplorable. “Curses on all fairies!” I gasp out; “I will never swallow another one as long as I live! Perdition seize all Benevolence! Be hanged to the Good and the True! Fling me every drop of the milk of human kindness out of the window!—Horrible curdling slops, away with them! Kick old Father Christmas out of doors, the abominable old impostor! Next year I’ll go to the Turks, the Scotch, and other Heathens who don’t keep Christmas. Is all the street to come for a Christmas box? Are the waits to be invading us by millions, and yelling all night? By my soul, if anybody offers me plum-pudding again this season, I’ll fling it in his face! (p. 111)

Now while all this is pleasurable to quote (and Scrooge did no better than the second—Bah! Humbug! Indeed!), it is quoted here not for the pleasure of it, but because it shows Thackeray’s conviction of the nature of Christmas, as of the Christmas book. There is a serious point to all this. We may add one more line, from the “Grumble” (p. 125): “Love is the humorists’ best characteristic, and gives that charming ring to their laughter in which all the good-natured world joins in chorus.” So the Christmas book should be genuine and loving, humorous in the best sense, simple (perhaps even “homely” in the British meaning of the word), calling back the days of one’s own childhood, or boyhood, or girlhood.

And so, presumably, Mr. Titmarsh’s own Christmas book was intended to be and do, though there seems to be some alloy—even of sarcasm—in the laughter. But surely this is a very mild form of carnival, almost (so to speak) an ordered form, that Thackeray is writing about. Quite so—yet when he wrote his own Christmas books, just as when he wrote these passages, his high spirits are themselves the spirits of carnival, of excess, of turning things topsy-turvy. That’s true, but for our purposes here, there’s more. We talk about Lewis’s conscious decision to write a children’s book—but it is at least arguable that Thackeray was the fore-runner here, with his conscious decision to write children’s (Christmas) books back a hundred years before Narnia. Or perhaps we should say Christmas (children’s) books. The point is, as with Lewis, that what he wanted to say demanded a certain form, though it’s arguable Thackeray played a greater part in designing that form than Lewis did. There is, for example, an influence of Narnia on Harry Potter (admitted, I think, by J.K. Rowling), but the Harry Potter books are school-stories with a fairy-tale apparatus incorporated as part of their real world—while the Narnia stories are about school-children out of school (except for the brief glimpses of Experiment House in The Silver Chair, and perhaps for Lucy’s eavesdropping on her schoolfellows in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”), though the same apparatus is (differently) incorporated into Narnia.

Here, in looking at Lewis’s antecessors, it may be time for an author’s switch from literary critic to literary specimen. Unfortunately, in this context, I had only one friend of my generation who was brought up on The Rose and the Ring, from which he seemed principally to have derived an appreciation of Victorian carnival—that’s only anecdotal evidence, of course, and he is no longer alive to give us more evidence or to serve as specimen. But I was brought up on Prince Prigio (though not on Ricardo of Pantouflia, which I did not read until adulthood). At an early age, I was terrified by the fight of the Remora with the Firedrake, one of my few childhood terrors recognizably derived from a fairy-story (if that is what Prigio is). I suppose I might have been terrified by the Earthquaker, though what I would have made of his being killed by a load of stupidity is hard to guess. But in the Firedrake and the Remora, Lang brought true faerie into his conte: yet, surprisingly, they do not overbalance it. It is not entirely clear why. Perhaps a look at the structure of Prince Prigio will produce at least a suggestion on the surprising balance Lang achieved there.

It will be recalled that, owing to the Queen’s disbelief, the fairies were not invited to court for Prince Prigio’s christening: they came anyway, and the last one to give a present gave the curse of too-cleverness. So when the Firedrake was harrying the kingdom, Prigio declined to attack it; his brothers did attack it, and perished, and he was therefore forsaken and abandoned. In that condition, he prowled the palace, found the other fairy gifts from his christening (Seven League Boots, Cap of Invisibility, Sword of Sharpness, and so on), flew off and set the Remora and the Firedrake against each other—thus destroying both—claimed his reward from King Grognio (Benson’s comic interlude comes in here), restored his brothers (and various knights et alii) to life (Lewis borrowed the scene for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe), married the British Ambassador’s daughter, wished to seem no cleverer than others, and they all (except the Remora and Firedrake) lived happily ever after.

It is known, from the date of the cheque for ten thousand purses that King Grognio wrote to Prince Prigio, in Falkenstein, in Pantouflia, that this adventure took place in July 1718, a date borne out by the appearance of Prince Charles Edward Stuart (1722–1788) in the sequel, a generation later. It may of course be in an alternative universe, inasmuch as Manoa, the City of the Sun, has diplomatic relations with both Pantouflia and Great Britain. In one way, this is a move apart from the contemporaneity of The Rose and the Ring (or, for that matter, of Five Children and It): it is not, however, a move into the once-upon-a-time mode of the fairy-tale, but into a distancing by history. The date may be noted to suggest a connection with another great (and satiric) set of travels, unaided by Seven League Boots on Flying Carpet, that took place about this time, in Lilliputia and elsewhere (and which, as has been noted, we know Lewis read in his childhood).

Prigio’s son Ricardo, the eponymous hero of the second book, is far from being too clever: in fact, he is chiefly interested in having adventures. So King Prigio hides the various fairy gifts, but Ricardo goes on having adventures and having—in the absence of the gifts—to be rescued by the Princess Jacqueline. He had rescued her in his very first adventure, before he found the gifts. Eventually, he fights the Yellow Dwarf (borrowed from D’Aulnoy as the Remora was borrowed from Cyrano), and The Giant Who Does Not Know When He Has Had Enough, and Prince Charles Edward (before the other two), with Jacqueline in each case rescuing him by magic. However, she is herself taken captive by the Giant and turned over to the Earthquaker for safekeeping.

She is rescued from the Earthquaker by King Prigio, who flattens him with a load of pedant’s stupidity, brought for the purpose from the moon, thus incidentally rescuing the City of the Sun, Manoa. The King of Manoa—the Inca—turns out to be Princess Jacqueline’s father. The Inca becomes a Lutheran (why a Lutheran?), the High Priest an Archbishop, Ricardo marries his Jacqueline (with the Giant sending the two Gifts he had captured as a wedding present), and everyone but the Yellow Dwarf (and in our world Charles Edward) lives happily ever after. It is not so good a book as Prigio, but it is much more Langian than Prigio. It is comedic (belonging to the mythos of comedy); it is humorous; there are comic touches; it has touches of the fantastic. But it is not fantasy, not often comic, and with almost no touch of carnival.

That is not quite true of Prigio, perhaps because of Thackeray’s influence. Where Thackeray was apparently largely original, Lang is derivative—though in this case derivative from Thackeray. In 1889, there was little reason for Lang’s characters to have Italianate names, except perhaps that Thackeray’s did. The cross old fairy who curses Prigio with too-cleverness must have been a close relation of the Fairy Blackstick. Benson is Lang’s version of Thackeray’s Gruffanuffs. And there is certainly a similarity of name between the Paflagonia of King Valoroso and the rest and the Pantouflia of Grognio (Prigio’s father) and Prince Prigio and Ricardo. But it is a similarity of name only, for here is Lang at his slyest, the master of the contes, the self-mocker. Pantouflia? Draw on your pantoufles, Mr. Lang might say, and let us pantoufle together. That is to say, draw on your slippers (the kind, my dictionary tells me, with “ni tige ni talon”) and let us talk together, intimately, quietly, slippertalk, fireside talk, all in the family. For that is what the words mean. (But perhaps Lang told his slipper-kingdom stories to children: it is possible, and it might explain his achievement.)

Thackeray took advantage of the lingering aspects of carnival in the early Victorian Christmas, finding a way in which to present to the Victorian audience a work both comic and fantastic, but with the comic taking precedence. (Sometimes Christmas books may say best what’s to be said?) Forty years later, with that route apparently closed, Lang sidestepped into comedy and humor, both creatures of order; and he treated the fantastic as though it were merely the fantastical. This requires a certain realism of technique and involves the humor of observation applied to the unreal—as with Prigio’s alternately cheering on the Firedrake and the Remora, or the townee/schoolboy slanging of Ricardo by the Yellow Dwarf. And then, in a very short time, there seems to have been a fundamental change in the English attitude toward fantasy and the fantastic, at least in the line of authors we are following here.

The change in our line here is so great that, while the connection between Thackeray and Lang is obvious, the connection between Lang and E. Nesbit, is far less so, though she and Lang were in fact contemporaries and acquaintances—yet it is possible to take her three books considered here as the beginnings of a reaction against Lang or his attitudes. But to do this would be to oversimplify. In fact, the Flying Carpet got a very short rest after its use by Lang in 1889 and 1893, till its use in The Phoenix and The Carpet in 1904. The Fairy of the Desert was transmogrified from her (or its) unpleasant appearance and activity in Ricardo of Pantouflia (this Eastern influence keeps coming in) to become—or perhaps to give birth to—the Sand-Fairy, the “It” of Five Children and It (1902). The carpet, of course is the eponymous machina of The Phoenix and The Carpet (1904). Here it should be noted that E. Nesbit follows Lang in bringing these machines of the timeless fairy-story into a time specific—whether 1718 or 1902. It may be noted also that Thackeray, though contemporaneous with his story, is not time-specific in quite the same way as E. Nesbit—and, of course, he engages in a distancing by space, even if ironic, that she does not.

The analysis here is directed not at E. Nesbit generally, or even at all her stories with magic in them, but only this one set of three: Five Children and It (1902), The Phoenix and The Carpet (1904), and The Story of the Amulet (1906). Though Professor Lewis spoke more highly of her stories of the Bastables, it was these he emulated, and indeed these he read as a child. The five children, it will be recalled, are Robert, Anthea (“Panther”), Jane, Cyril (“Squirrel”), and “the lamb” (whose name when he is grown up will be Hilary St. Maur Devereux, but who is now fortunately only “the lamb”). They are real children, in a way that (to me) Peter and Susan and Edmund and Lucy are not, and certainly they are real children in a way that Bulbo and Betsinda and the rest of Thackeray’s “young adults” in The Rose and the Ring are not and are not intended to be. Thackeray’s satiric world was distanced by space and the absurdity of the naming, and Lang’s by time and space and naming (but it is closer to England all the same, and Prigio marries the British Ambassador’s daughter). E. Nesbit’s creation is right here and now, yet it remains in the realms of fantasy, and follows the fairy-tale mode of proceeding from the here-and-now to the elsewhere-and-now (and even the elsewhere-and-othertime), before coming back again.

It may be instructive to concentrate here on three episodes, one from each of the three books in the set. In Five Children and It, the episode recounts the result of the wish to live in a castle, made between the time Robert arranged for the Psammead to grant a wish made by the others not in his presence, and the time Robert got back to the house to tell them he had made the arrangement. In The Phoenix and The Carpet, the episode recounts the visit of the Phoenix to the Phoenix Fire Office. In The Story of the Amulet, the episode recounts the merging of Rekh-mara with Jimmy—though it is tempting to take instead the visit of the Babylonian Queen to London, on which Jadis’s visit in The Magician’s Nephew was so evidently based. These have in common at least three things, apart from such obvious matters as their involving the same five children, and their appearing in a series of books by the same author. First, they are all in the realm of fantasy. Wishing for a castle does not commonly provide one. The phoenix is a fabulous bird that does not ordinarily visit London insurance companies, even those bearing his name. And ancient Egyptian priests are not frequently transported by magic amulets through time and merged with learned gentlemen who study at the British Museum. Second, all three (though the third the least) have their comic aspects. Of course, being besieged in the castle, like all the other ill-considered things the children wish for, turns out to be far different in experience from what it was in imagination. The Phoenix, coming to the Insurance offices in the belief they are his temple, and the employees his priests and acolytes, in fact converts the employees to his belief, and the pleasant fantasy is worked out with good humor and skill (better humor, perhaps, than with the Queen of Babylon, though the skill there is no less). But the merging of the Priest Rekh-mara and Jimmy? That is, at least partly, another story.

That there has been a good deal of humor in the building up of the character of Jimmy, and episodes of the comic in the story of Rekh-mara, is undoubted (‘“For there is no secret sacred name under the altar of Amen-Ra.’ ‘Oh yes there is!’ said a voice from under the bed.”—the Psammead, of course. [p. 613 in the Octopus one-volume ed., 1979]). But when Rekh-mara’s soul and Jimmy’s soul become one, each gaining his heart’s desire, and the evil in Rekh-mara’s soul becomes the scorpion that Robert kills, we have moved from the comic or even the humorous into the mythopoetic (even if the mythopoeisis is a little too much like Rider Haggard’s for some tastes).

The Story of the Amulet, unlike the first two books of E. Nesbit’s “trilogy” (if that word may be used here), is pretty much serious adventuring, though the Queen’s coming to London and the sailors’ singing about Tyre that rules the waves are at least comic interludes. It is here, in this story, that the great overarching wave breaks over Atlantis, here that there is a true granting of Heart’s Desire, and here that the process of growing up (as when they see the pictures of themselves as adults while they are visiting Jimmy and the Amulet in the future) is given a serious treatment for the children—though the point is much the same as with the sudden growing-up of “the lamb” in the earlier volume. Neither is welcome—and that is not quite a throw-away line. They are not welcome because they have not come well—that is, in the natural order of things.

It may be that the children who read Five Children and It in 1902 were prepared for this greater seriousness in 1906. But it may also be (and it is well to remember) that the Englishness of English art (in Sir Nikolaus Pevsner’s phrase) consists in the detailed observation of life around one, and in using this detailed observation to point a moral as well as to adorn a tale. It is possible that E. Nesbit’s recovery of this particularly English sense and sensibility of humor has something to do with her association with William Morris and the Fabians. Be that as it may, there is a change in her creations between 1902 and 1906, as well as—and on top of—the obvious change between Lang’s Ricardo (1893) and the first of the “Psammead” books. Part of what sets E. Nesbit apart from Thackeray and Lang, in these books, lies in the replacement of the comic and fantastical by a genuine fantasy that is humorous, though with some comic scenes. Lewis mentions the Bastables in The Magician’s Nephew, but he does not emulate Nesbit’s Bastable stories, which are (as he says) character studies of children written the only way children will read character studies.

Lang has “Englished” Thackeray’s breakfast-table jeu d’ésprit—Prigio is recognizably an English schoolboy, of a particularly repellent type, and Ricardo is Prigio’s son and the son of the British Ambassador’s daughter. In Thackeray, the fantastic is the comic, and though there are shrewd touches (on occasion betraying something of Pevsner’s Englishness), these are generally unreal estates. In Lang, less so. Here, once again, it may be time to use critics as specimens. I disagree with Lewis that Lang achieved true fantasy with the death of the Yellow Dwarf, but here Lewis may be used as a specimen. The Remora terrified me as a child, and here I may be used as a specimen. The fact is, Lewis felt something with the Yellow Dwarf, as I with the Remora. Something of Lang’s wide reading in the English medieval must have rubbed off on him. The Giant Who Does Not Know When He Has Had Enough, though scarcely a portrait drawn from life, is a lifelike portrait.

Just as Lewis, writing the Narnia books after the manner of E. Nesbit, created something quite different from Nesbit, so Lang, writing children’s books after the manner of Thackeray, created something quite different from Thackeray. It was thirty-five years from Betsinda to Prigio, nearly fifty from “the lamb” to The Lion, but in both cases, in changing the original, the personality of the imitator was more important than the lapse of time. (For those adding up years, there were about ten years from Ricardo to Robert and Anthea and the rest.) In any case, by the time of E. Nesbit, the comic / fantastic of Thackeray and the comic / humorous fantasticality of Lang have been replaced by that strange creature, the humorous fantasy. The phrase “strange creature” is used advisedly. Grahame essayed something of the sort in The Wind in the Willows (1908), humorous in precisely that English sense, though occasionally comic, as with Toad and the Washerwoman, but it has generally not been widely done or well (though Alan Garner may be an exception, and even early Harry Potter). This brings us to Ratty and Moley and Toad and Badger in The Wind in the Willows.

“The Mole had been working very hard all morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms” (The Wind in the Willows in The Penguin Kenneth Grahame, p. 181). Here, at the very beginning of Grahame’s great achievement, we come upon a paradox. This is quintessential Arcady, but Moley’s house, Ratty’s house with its bright fire in the parlour, the picnic basket with the comforts of home (“coldtonguecoldhamcoldbeefPickledgherkinssaladfrenchrollscresssad widgespottedmeatgingerbeerlemonadesodawater”), Toad’s caravan (less so Toad Hall), and above all, Badger’s house, all speak to the comforts of home.

There are dangers in the Wild Wood, dangers from which Ratty and Moley are rescued by Badger’s House. I cannot forbear further quotation here (Penguin Kenneth Grahame, pp. 209–210): “He shuffled on in front of them, carrying the light, and they followed him, nudging each other in an anticipating sort of way, down a long, gloomy, and, to tell the truth, decidedly shabby passage, into a sort of a central hall, out of which they could dimly see other long tunnel-like passages branching, passages mysterious and without apparent end. But there were doors in the hall as well—stout oaken comfortable-looking doors. One of these the Badger flung open, and at once they found themselves all in the glow and warmth of a large fire-lit kitchen.

The floor was well-worn red brick, and on the wide hearth burnt a fire of logs, between two attractive chimney-corners tucked away in the wall, well out of any suspicion of draught. A couple of high-backed settles, facing each other on either side of the fire, gave further sitting accommodation for the sociably disposed. In the middle of the room stood a long table of plain boards placed on trestles, with benches down each side. At one end of it, where an arm-chair stood pushed back, were spread the remains of Badger’s plain but ample supper. Rows of spotless plates winked from the shelves of the dresser at the far end of the room, and, from the rafters overhead, hung hams, bundles of dried herbs, nets of onions, and baskets of eggs. It seemed a place where heroes could fitly feast after victory, where weary harvesters could line up in scores along the table and keep their harvest home with mirth and song, or where two or three friends of simple taste could sit about as they pleased and eat and smoke and talk in comfort and contentment.

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, novelist, science-fiction and fantasy writer, philosopher (though old-fashioned), satirist and controversialist—and the hero of Boswell’s great and unique memoir The Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson, in which we hear him (in his own phrase) “talking for victory.” W.H. Lewis described his brother’s conversation with that phrase, and some scholars, Claude Rawson notably among them, have called Lewis the “schoolboy” Dr. Johnson (in an essay in the Times Literary Supplement in 1989).

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, this was pretty much before the “Invention of the Child.” And it is in places genuinely funny. Another line of descent begins with the “modern fantasy” of Kingsley’s The Water-Babies—but despite the fact that Lewis’s mother read this to him (or perhaps because of that), it is not really the line in which the Narnia books eventually appear. The true line for E. Nesbit’s “Psammead” books, which are the model for Narnia, is (as I have pointed out recently in The Rise of Tolkienian Fantasy), from Thackeray in The Rose and the Ring (1854) to Andrew Lang in Prince Prigio (1889) and Ricardo of Pantouflia (1893), to Five Children and It (1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904), and The Story of the Amulet (1906). And part of the progress along this line is from the comical and fantastical to the slyness and slipper-talk and mocking humor of Lang (which nevertheless can conceal neither his real taste for fantasy nor something real in his humor) to the humorous fantasy of the Five Children.

Lewis was witty but not, like his father, a comic. In his critical work, he praises what we have come to regard as the English humor of detail He praises the poet Layamon’s description of Arthur, turning alternately red and white when he learns that he is the King. He praises the description of Mordred bleeding “both over the upper sheet and the nether sheet”—and observes “Best of all, we are told how much it cost (£20,000) to send the expedition in search of Sir Lancelot.” Similarly, he rejoices in Gavin Douglas’s prologues in the Middle Scots XIII Bukes of Eneados, with (for example) Douglas, on a frosty morning, leaving the window “a lytill on char” and crawling back under the “claythis thrinfauld.” (This example is from English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, p. 88.) Not only did he recognize the trait; he obviously welcomed it. Moreover, it was a part of a lot of the stories and books in parts he read in The Strand—and it was a part of what Lewis wanted in the novels he read.

If to love Story is to love excitement then I ought to be the greatest lover of excitement alive. But the fact is that what is said to be the most “exciting” novel in the world, The Three Musketeers, makes no appeal to me at all. The total lack of atmosphere repels me. There is no country in the book—save as a storehouse of inns and ambushes. There is no weather. (On Stories, p. 7)

Yet there were many novels (and short-story collections) available with both story and atmosphere, with the humor of detailed observation—and not just Trollope, his father’s favorite. Somerville and Ross have it, especially with The Irish R.M. and Further Adventures, and Mr. Knox’s Country. Thackeray has it with Henry Esmond and The Virginians (which are ancestors of Buchan’s Salute to Adventurers), if not with The Rose and the Ring.

But it is not something Lewis seems to have used much in the Narnia stories, though he certainly used it in That Hideous Strength. What he does use in the Narnia stories is the comic vision he learned in his youth—a touch of caricature (in Professor Kirke, “Bless me! What do they teach them in these schools?” in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe)—the dogginess of the Talking Dogs in several of the Narnian stories and especially in The Last Battle (which touches on English humor)—the Monopods (“Dufflepuds”) in The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”—all likely to be throwbacks to Punch. There is no question that Punch was a huge influence in the Lewis household, and those who have read the collection of one hundred of Albert Lewis’s dicta that the Lewis brothers put together in 1922 (Pudaita Pie, in the Marion Wade Collection at Wheaton College) will have seen how often Albert Lewis’s comments ended with a genuine Punch-line.

This may help explain the discordant view of Narnia taken by Lewis’s old friend Ronald Tolkien. He thought it something of a jumble, everything put in, as in the chorus of the old song “Widdecombe Fair”—“with Bill Brewer, Jan Stewer, Peter Gurney, Peter Davy, Dan’l Whidden, Harry Hawk, old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all, old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all.” That jumble is characteristic of the comic or of comedy (even in Northrop Frye’s definition of the mythos of comedy): the point is that the jumble is to be straightened out and resolved—everything will be drawn together and then everything will be set right. Even, in miniature, set right by a Punch-line.

But the jumble, in Tolkien’s view, ought not to extend to the cast of characters, and, in his view, here—at least in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe—it does so extend. What he saw was the combination of classical mythology, fauns and satyrs and all, with Father Christmas, and then (especially in Prince Caspian) with dwarfs and other figures out of Norse mythology, and then a fairy-tale element, and Talking Beasts and other creatures out of children’s literature—exactly what we might expect from story beginning with pictures (in this case, meaning in effect visions) following the logic of dream and vision rather than waking logic.

This takes us back to Novalis and the Blue Flower, and away from the ordinary—though associational—logic of childhood. Remember the famous dictum by Novalis: “Our life is not a dream—but it shall, and maybe must, become one” (Novalis Schriften 1977, vol. III, p. 281, aphorism no. 237). Novalis’s doctrine of the dream is the basis for George MacDonald’s use of dreams, as his doctrine of the Bergmann and the Earth is the basis for much that is in the Curdie books. The miner, the Bergmann, is the priest of Earth, the third cave into which the Bergmann leads Heinrich von Ofterdingen is a symbolic stopping place on the way to the Golden Age in which all time is at once, through the door of the timeless. This gives the clue to the importance of dream and Marchen (fairy-tale) in which Novalis finds Romantic truth.

In both dream and Marchen, as in the child’s world, orderly operation of time is suspended (Novalis Schriften 1977, vol. III, p. 452, aphorism no. 959): “Dreams are often meaningful and prophetic because they are natural effects of the soul—and are thus based on the order of association. They are meaningful like poetry—but for that reason also irregularly meaningful—absolutely free.” And this ties in with the nature of Märchen, which we translate (badly—it is really untranslatable) as fairytale or folk-tale. The time of a true Marchen is a time of freedom, when everything is miraculous and mysterious, a time before time. The true Marchen must be prophetic depiction, and the genuine poet of Märchen (or teller of Märchen) is a seer of the future as well as an ideal and ironic child (summarizing Novalis Schriften 1977, vol. III, pp. 280–81, aphorism no. 234).

The freedom Novalis finds in dream derives from what we may call the associational and non-linear progress of dream. As we have noted, childhood also has something of that freedom—but childhood also has a different (associational) logic. Moreover, that freedom is, in Novalis’s view, the freedom of the Golden Age—which is Arcadian. It may be ironic that the Curdie books are miner’s pastoral in the harsh land of Scotland, but they are pastoral and they are children’s books. And when Novalis says that life is not a dream but should and must become one, he is also saying that we must be free of time, not only as a dream is free, but as a Marchen or childhood or Arcady is free. The ironic child is the prophet; the prophecy is the Marchen. Here we begin to see a possible key to considering the Narnian stories as Comedy as well as comedy, and a true connection of fairy-tale (if defined as Marchen) with children’s stories.