38. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis

There are very few books with the title-formula ‘The x, the x and the x’. ‘The x and the x’ is very common: The Ring and the Book; The Oak and the Calf; The Naked and the Dead; The Sound and the Fury — the list could go on. The only genre in which one finds a profusion of titles of the three-barrelled variety is in fairy tales. Thus we have The Knapsack, The Hat and The Horn; The Mouse, the Bird and the Sausage; One-Eye, Two-Eyes and Three-Eyes; The Spindle, The Shuttle and The Needle; The Straw, the Coal and the Bean. CS Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was intended to fit into the fairy-tale tradition.

In his book of essays Of Other Worlds Lewis said that it all began with mental images:

All my seven Narnia books, and my three science fiction books, began with seeing pictures in my head. At first they were not a story, just pictures. The Lion all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself: ‘Let's try to make a story about it.’ At first I had very little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it. I think I had been having a good many dreams of lions about that time. Apart from that, 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 six other Narnian stories in after Him.

When it came to the witch, the influences went beyond mental pictures. In 1948 Lewis remarked to a friend that he was attempting a children’s book ‘in the tradition of E. Nesbit’. Nesbit is in fact central to understanding not only the first Narnia book but the whole of the series. Nesbit wrote about dragons, magic, ancient Egypt, travel in time and space, socialism and wishes coming true; perhaps more importantly for Lewis’s fiction she wrote about extraordinary things happening to ordinary children. One of Nesbit’s adventures was The Story of the Amulet, in which we find the prototype for Jadis, the White Witch, in the person of the Queen of Babylon. Like Jadis, the Queen is haughty, magnificently dressed, physically imposing and liable to shout things such as ‘Kill the dogs!’ She is summoned to London by magic, as is Jadis in The Magician’s Nephew, where she creates a very similar style of havoc.

There are a numerous other Nesbit echoes throughout the Narnia series. One deserves special consideration: the detail of the wardrobe.

In 1908 Nesbit published a story in Blackie’s Christmas Annual called ‘The Aunt and Amabel’. Eight-year-old Amabel has displeased her aunt by cutting the heads off all the flowers in the greenhouse, and has been sent to the ‘best bedroom’ as a punishment. While incarcerated she begins looking through a book of railway timetables, and discovers a destination called ‘Whereyouwanttogoto’:

This was odd — but the name of the station from which it started was still more extraordinary, for it was not Euston or Cannon Street or Marylebone.
The name of the station was 'Bigwardrobeinspareroom.' And below this name, really quite unusual for a station, Amabel read in small letters:
'Single fares strictly forbidden. Return tickets No Class Nuppence. Trains leave Bigwardrobeinspareroom all the time.'
And under that in still smaller letters —
‘You had better go now.'
What would you have done? Rubbed your eyes and thought you were dreaming? Well, if you had, nothing more would have happened. Nothing ever does when you behave like that. Amabel was wiser. She went straight to the Big Wardrobe and turned its glass handle.

Amabel goes through the wardrobe and finds a curious railway station, whence she is launched into a little adventure. Lucy goes through the wardrobe in the spare room and encounters Mr Tumnus, the faun:

‘I — I got in through the wardrobe in the spare room,’ said Lucy.
‘Ah! If only I had worked harder at geography when I was a little Faun,’ said Mr. Tumnus, ‘I'd know all about strange countries.’
‘The wardrobe is not a country. It's only back there where it's summer,’ said Lucy.
‘It has been winter for so long in Narnia,’ said the Faun sadly. ‘Daughter of Eve from the far land of Spare Oom, would you have tea with me?’

Consulted:
Green, Roger Lancelyn and Hooper, Walter: CS Lewis, A Biography (Collins, 1974)
Lewis, CS: Letters to Children (Collins, 1985)
Lewis, CS: Of Other Worlds (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966)
Wilson, AN: CS Lewis, A Biography (Collins, 1990)

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