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СКАЧАТЬ came the early Beatrix Potter volumes, hot from the press. Squirrel Nutkin, his favourite, was published in 1903 before he was five. ‘I liked the Beatrix Potter illustrations at a time when the idea of humanized animals fascinated me perhaps even more than it fascinates most children,’ he wrote in An Experiment in Criticism (1961);¹⁰ and he followed up this fascination through the pages of old volumes of Punch with their animal cartoons by Tenniel and Sambourne and Partridge, besides those in Lewis Carroll, and in the old Dalziel illustrations to Mother Goose of which a copy of the 1895 reprint had been given to Warnie.

The first real introduction to romance came by chance, by way of a copy of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in which he was able to taste something of the true Logres even through Mark Twain’s vulgar ridicule of the great Arthurian cycle. This was followed by an even more blessed discovery: the monthly Strand Magazine was serializing Conan Doyle’s Sir Nigel from December 1905 to December 1906 – a real introduction to the world of chivalry. But more important even than Mark Twain’s perverted Arthuriad and Doyle’s brightly coloured Middle Ages were the serials in the Strand by E. Nesbit with H.R. Millar’s superb and evocative illustrations: Five Children – and It (April to December 1902), The Phoenix and the Carpet (July 1903 to June 1904), and The Story of the Amulet (May 1905 to April 1906). ‘The last did most for me,’ he recollected in 1955. ‘It first opened my eyes to antiquity, the “dark backward and abysm of time”.¹¹ I can still re-read it with delight.’¹²

This naturally leads on to the stories that Jack Lewis began writing before he was six and continued to elaborate for the next half-dozen years or more. After the move to Little Lea, he soon ‘staked out a claim to one of the attics’ and made it his ‘study’, decorating the walls with pictures of his own making or cut from brightly coloured Christmas editions of magazines. ‘Here,’ he records, ‘my first stories were written, and illustrated, with enormous satisfaction. They were an attempt to combine my two chief literary pleasures – “dressed animals” and “knights-in-armour”. As a result, I wrote about chivalrous mice and rabbits who rode out in complete mail to kill not giants but cats.’¹³

It is tempting to look here for the origin of such characters as Reepicheep the chivalric Talking Mouse, one of the most successfully developed among the higher animals of Narnia. But when discussing stories made up in childhood and their effect, or otherwise, on those written later, he told Green categorically that none of the characters or adventures in the Narnian stories was drawn from the Animal-Land of his own childhood inventions. The whole spirit of Narnia is different, as he also pointed out in Surprised by Joy: ‘Animal-Land had nothing whatever in common with Narnia except the anthropomorphic beasts. Animal-Land, by its whole quality, excluded the least hint of wonder.’¹⁴ ‘In mapping and chronicling Animal-Land I was training myself to be a novelist. Note well, a novelist; not a poet. My invented world was full (for me) of interest, bustle, humour and character; but there was no poetry, even no romance in it. It was almost astonishingly prosaic.’¹⁵

Moreover, the Animal-Land that came into action in the holidays when Warnie was at home from his English boarding-school ‘was a modern Animal-Land; it had to have trains and steamships if it was to be a country shared with him. It followed, of course, that the medieval Animal-Land about which I wrote my stories must be the same country at an earlier period; and of course the two periods must be properly connected. This led me from romancing to historiography: I set about writing a full history of Animal-Land.’ History led to geography: the world was remapped with Warnie’s ‘India’ as an island across the sea from Animal-Land, ‘And those parts of that world which we regarded as our own – Animal-Land and India – were increasingly peopled with consistent characters,’¹⁶ and came to be known generally as ‘Boxen’.

      Many of Lewis’s Boxonian stories have been published as Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young C.S. Lewis (1985). The best of the stories come from the later period and were written between the ages of twelve and fourteen, when they became novels about minor characters rather than straight ‘histories’. While they show great precocity, there is little evidence of anything else and hardly any foreshadowing of what was to come: they are interesting as the earliest works of C.S. Lewis, and dull compared to his later writings. This is largely due to the careful banishment of poetic, romantic and imaginative elements and to the extra- ordinary absorption with politics. This has been explained by Warnie Lewis in his ‘Memoir’ accompanying the Letters of C.S. Lewis: here he describes the continuous political discussions current in Ireland at the time, mainly diatribes against the government of the day between men of the same political persuasions – and vituperative and unexplained condemnation of all who differed from them in politics or religion. Warnie concludes:

Any ordinary parent would have sent us boys off to amuse ourselves elsewhere when one of these symposiums took place, but not my father; he would have thought it uncivil to the guest. Consequently we had to sit in silence while the torrent of vituperation flowed over our heads. The result in Jack’s case was to convince him firstly that ‘grown-up’ conversation and politics were one and the same thing, and that therefore he must give everything he wrote a political framework; and secondly to disgust him with the very word ‘politics’ before he was out of his teens.¹⁷

      Moreover, although the Boxonian characters are ‘dressed animals’, there is no attempt to keep up the fiction, and without the illustrations it would often be hard to remember that, for example, Lord John Big is a frog, James Bar a bear, Macgoullah a horse, and Viscount Puddiphat an owl. And unfortunately few of the early stories of ‘knights-in-armour’ (even if the knights were dressed animals) have survived, though there are a few early attempts at verse concerning ‘Knights and Ladyes’.

‘In mapping and chronicling Animal-Land,’ said Lewis, ‘I was training myself to be a novelist … but there was no poetry, even no romance in it.’¹⁸ At the same time he had an inner life, invisible to all but himself, that was highly imaginative. Shortly after the family moved to Little Lea he had three experiences which initiated ‘the central story’¹⁹ of his life. In Surprised by Joy he told how one day, as he was standing beside a flowering currant bush, there arose in him the ‘memory of a memory’ of a day in Dundela Villas when Warnie brought his toy garden into the nursery. ‘It is difficult’, he said, ‘to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton’s “enormous bliss” of Eden … comes somewhere near it.’²⁰ It was, he went on, ‘a sensation of desire’, but before he knew what he desired ‘the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased’.²¹

A second ‘glimpse’ came through Beatrix Potter’s Squirrel Nutkin which, he said, ‘troubled me with what I can only describe as the Idea of Autumn’.²² A third glimpse came through a few lines of Longfellow’s translation of Esaias Tegner’s version (1825) of Drapa:

      I heard a voice, that cried,

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