Biography - childhood
C.S. Lewis - Narnia and the North
C.S. Lewis (29 November 1898 - 22 November 1963) was a prolific writer, poet, scholar of English literature and defender of Christianity. His most famous book is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first published of his Chronicles of Narnia.
This article explores more of Lewis the man, the storyteller and the Christian.
Lewis the man
C.S. Lewis's own account of his early years reads like a list of books, along with a few people, that shaped his life. Lewis was born in Belfast in 1898, the younger of two sons. His parents Albert and Flora were both keen readers. In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis describes himself as "a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstair indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books."
Born Clive Staples Lewis, he announced when he was three years old that his name was Jack, and Jack he was to family and friends for the rest of his life. His older brother was Warren, nicknamed Warnie.
Jack Lewis's childhood was "humdrum, prosaic happiness". He and Warren were close friends, and would spend long hours drawing and writing together. Warren's interest was in trains and steamships, while Jack liked "dressed animals" and tales of knights and chivalry. Jack diplomatically combined the modern and mediaeval themes into a continuing history of the imaginary country Animal-Land, later combined with Warren's kingdom of India and christened Boxen. Chronicling the adventures of the Boxonians kept both brothers occupied for years to come.
Jack's parents were Ulster Protestants and he grew up being taken to church every Sunday. He found the services uninspiring. They were Christianity with the life leached out of it: more a political statement than a statement of faith; a weekly demonstration that they were not Catholics. They formed in Jack a distaste for Christianity that lasted into adulthood.
"No more of the old security"
The children's lives changed after the death of their mother in August 1908. Jack said that "all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life". He and Warren became more reliant on each other, but their relationship with their father became increasingly distant.
Soon afterwards Jack was sent to a boarding school called Wynyard. The school, which in Surprised by Joy he tellingly nicknamed Belsen, was by all accounts a dreadful place. Lessons consisted of learning by rote or being left with a slate and made to do sums. The headmaster, Robert "Oldie" Capron, seems to have been a cruel man who would flog the boys with little provocation. His neighbours believed him to be insane.
It was at Wynyard that Jack first tried to be Christian. He made a list of resolutions and tried to pray each night, but allowed himself to be distracted by worries about whether he was praying correctly.
It is clear that Albert Lewis did not know what life was like for his sons at Wynyard. Jack stayed there until the school closed down from lack of pupils. After half a term at another school, after which he was withdrawn with an illness, Jack attended a prep school called Cherbourg. Here he was happy - thanks in part to discovering the music of Richard Wagner, but also by comparison to Wynyard - and his academic standards quickly improved. He also began to associate with what he later considered to be bad influences. Warren was becoming rebellious at the same time: he eventually was expelled from college and joined an army academy. Jack went on to secondary school at Malvern College.