'A faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion.’ Thus C. S. Lewis inventoried the starting point of what would become the best loved of his novels for children, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, published 75 years ago.
The novel’s inspiration, Lewis claimed, also included an image — clear in his imagination since his teenage years — of ‘parcels in a snowy wood’. From these vivid shards emerged the first of what Roger Lancelyn Green (like Lewis, a member of the Oxford literary group known as the Inklings) collectively labelled ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’: stories of good versus evil, rich in symbolism, set in an imaginary world of magic and talking animals.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe even featured Father Christmas, ‘a huge man in a bright red robe (bright as hollyberries) with a hood that had fur inside it and a great white beard that fell like a foamy waterfall over his chest’. In Lewis’s Narnian fantasy world, Father Christmas is ‘so big, and so glad, and’ — most of all — ‘so real’; he inspires ‘a deep shiver of gladness’ in the children he encounters. Appropriately for a novel set in the English countryside amid the privations of the Second World War, he brings to Lucy, Susan, Peter and Mr and Mrs Beaver ‘a large tray containing five cups and saucers, a bowl of lump sugar, a jug of cream, and a great big teapot all sizzling and piping hot’, everyday luxuries mostly absent from wartime childhoods. As much as anything, it is a story about the return of Christmas to a land from which festivities have been banished during a century of winter. The return of hope, love, kindness and joy.
Described on publication as ‘a kind of modern fairy tale about four children evacuated to an old house in the country during the war’, the novel at first inspired mixed reactions. Fantasy had not hitherto been among Lewis’s stock in trade. For more than two decades a fellow of Oxford’s Magdalen College, the 50-something academic, who later became a professor of medieval and Renaissance literature, had achieved widespread renown for a series of broadcasts about Christianity. These were made during the Second World War and later published in a trilogy of volumes that included 1943’s Christian Behaviour.
'A number of mothers and, still more, schoolmistresses, have decided that it is likely to frighten children, so it is not selling very well’
One early reviewer of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe described Lewis as ‘the author of profound works on theology’ and suggested that, in writing for children, he had ‘taken a holiday’. Lewis himself described a prevalent view that children would be unsettled by the life-and-death struggle of good versus evil at the heart of the novel as a hindrance to its initial popularity. In a letter of March 5, 1951, six months after publication, he noted that ‘a number of mothers and, still more, schoolmistresses, have decided that it is likely to frighten children, so it is not selling very well’. Accurately, he pointed out, ‘real children like it… I think it frightens some adults, but very few children’.
‘Real’ children, of course, soon decided the novel’s fate, whatever the misgivings of mothers and schoolmistresses, and the reviewer’s claim that Lewis’s ‘little book may well become a children’s classic’ was swiftly realised. Sales built steadily and continued to for the rest of the decade. Between 1950 and 1956, Lewis published six other ‘Narnia’ stories, culminating with The Last Battle, which won the Carnegie Medal. Winter issues of The Bookseller typically carried an advertisement for which the wording did not change. Lewis’s ‘Narnia’ stories, the advertisements suggested, were ‘always in demand at Christmas’, as they have remained — and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe most of all.
It’s easy to see why. Like Mary Norton’s ‘Borrowers’ stories and the ‘Green Knowe’ novels of Lucy M. Boston, which were also first published in the 1950s, Lewis’s novel begins in ‘the sort of house that you never seem to come to the end of… full of unexpected places’; a house belonging to an elderly professor, ‘large and complicated and full of hiding places’.
Among these hiding places is the wardrobe of the novel’s title. Through it, arms stretched out in front of her, Lucy — the youngest and most engaging of the four Pevensie siblings — takes two or three steps beyond a second row of coats and finds herself ‘standing in the middle of a wood at night-time with snow under her feet and snowflakes falling through the air’. Ahead lies a lamppost, a ‘very strange person’ (shortly revealed as Mr Tumnus the faun) and a fantastical world of mystery and adventure. ‘I can always get back if anything goes wrong,’ Lucy tells herself.
As in the best childhood reveries, the action of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe shapes all four children for the remainder of their lives, long after they have safely returned through the wardrobe — its imprint stronger than their belief in magic, which fades with the cynicism of adulthood. In 1956, the Manchester Guardian claimed that Lewis ‘enters other worlds in the same dreamlike and certain way as Hans Anderson’. For 75 years, he has enabled young and old readers to do the same, and to share Lucy’s certainty that ‘it’s all true… There is a country you can get to through the wardrobe’.
It is, of course, not simply a story about escape. This is a tale rich in Christian symbolism. Although Lewis himself dismissed as ‘pure moonshine’ any suggestion that, in embarking on his first Narnian adventure, he set out to ‘say something about Christianity to children’, the Christ-like figure of Aslan, sacrificed as the cost of Narnia’s victory over the White Witch, plays a key part in both the novel’s plot and Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy’s understanding of good and bad in the troublingly grown-up world they inadvertently enter.
‘At first I had very little idea how the story would go,’ Lewis reflected later. ‘Then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it… I don’t know where the lion came from or why He came. But once He was there He pulled the whole story together, and soon He pulled the other six Narnian stories in after Him.’ The purposeful capitalisation of Aslan’s pronouns is Lewis’s own.
The BBC’s peerless 1998 adaptation, with Ronald Pickup as the voice of Aslan.
Since 1950, readers have responded differently to this element of Lewis’s writing, even if many agree with the contemporary who argued that ‘the thread of allegory is clear enough to give added point to the story, slight enough to be sometimes disregarded’. Simply written, in a direct, colourful and lively manner, the seven ‘Narnia’ novels tell their stories with absorbing vigour.
A children’s author, Lewis wrote, enjoys a unique relationship with his readers; neither parent, teacher nor fellow child, but a familiar equal, ‘like the postman, the butcher and the dog next door’. He may have a ringside seat, but the novel’s narrator experiences the story’s tribulations and triumphs much as the reader does. Like the majority of children, he cherishes rebellious instincts: made clear in the Professor’s disdain for schools, Lucy’s contempt for the White Witch and the children’s dislike of the animals in the White Witch’s service.
This combination of the ordinary and the extraordinary (Susan’s fearful determination that, whatever the risks, the children ‘must try to do something for Mr Whatever-his-name is — I mean the Faun’) contributes to the success of the book. Like Enid Blyton’s Famous Five or Boston’s Tolly, the Pevensies are not paragons. Most children recognise aspects of themselves in Peter, Susan and Lucy, as well as Edmund, who backs the wrong horse by choosing self over others, the White Witch over Aslan, winter over Christmas.
Up to a point, Lewis’s novel offers its readers choices, as well as promoting a moral framework in line with Miss Prism’s definition of fiction in The Importance of Being Earnest: ‘The good [end] happily and the bad unhappily.’ When he appears to the children, Father Christmas is described as ‘a person whom everyone knew the moment they set eyes on him’. Quite soon, the children recognise that the same applies to the godly Aslan.
After 75 years, Lewis’s story has lost none of its power to delight. It ‘will capture the imagination of most children as well as that of an older generation,’ the Catholic Herald stated of Lewis’s fifth Narnian novel, The Horse and His Boy, in 1954. The same is undeniably true of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe — and, surely, certain to remain so.