by C. S. Lewis
THE HISTORY OF BOXEN
By Walter Hooper
Had not Albert Lewis moved his family into ‘Little Lea’ on the outskirts of Belfast on the 21st April 1905 the present Little-Master of Boxen might never have been born. Albert, a police court solicitor, had the house built for his wife, Flora, and their sons. The sons were Warren, born 16th June 1895, and Clive Staples, born 29th November 1898, and they were known to their parents and friends as Warnie and Jack. Years later Jack was to say of Little Lea in Chapter I of his autobiography, Surprised by Joy (1955):
To a child it seemed less like a house than a city … The New House is almost a major character in my story. I am 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. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them. There were books in the study, books in the drawing-room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interests, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass … Out of doors was ‘the view’ for which, no doubt, the site had principally been chosen. From our front door we looked down over wide fields to Belfast Lough and across it to the long mountain line of the Antrim shore … This was in the far-off days when Britain was the world’s carrier and the Lough was full of shipping; a delight to both us boys.
At this time it was usual for the established families of Northern Ireland to send their children to English schools. Warnie had hitherto been taught by his mother and his governess, Miss Annie Harper. Now that he was ten he had less than a month to explore Little Lea before he was sent to Wynyard School in Watford, Hertfordshire. His parents believed it to be a good school. But those who would know of the horrors that Warnie, and later Jack, found there will find a description of it in Chapter II of Surprised by Joy where it is called ‘Belsen’. Meanwhile, Jack – for whom the parting from Warnie was very painful – was being taught French and Latin by Mrs Lewis and everything else by Miss Harper.
Jack staked out a claim to one of the attics which became known as ‘the little end room’. He found that what drove him to write was an extreme manual clumsiness owing to having only one joint in his thumbs. For this reason, and because all the desks in the house were too tall for him to write on, his parents had a table made for him. ‘Jack’s Desk’, as it was called, is 2-feet square and 23 inches high. It was on it that the earliest stories of Animal-Land were composed, though all the Boxen stories were written in this attic room. I mention ‘Jack’s Desk’ because of the sentimental value it always had for Jack and Warnie and because it’s the only piece of furniture left from that room. Describing ‘the little end room’ in Chapter I of Surprised by Joy, Jack said:
Here 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. But already the mood of the systematiser was strong in me; the mood which led Trollope so endlessly to elaborate his Barsetshire. The Animal-Land which came into action in the holidays when my brother was at home 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. Though more than one version of this instructive work is extant, I never succeeded in bringing it down to modern times; centuries take a deal of filling when all the events have to come out of the historian’s head … There was soon a map of Animal-Land – several maps, all tolerably consistent. Then Animal-Land had to be geographically related to my brother’s India, and India consequently lifted out of its place in the real world. We made it an island, with its north coast running along the back of the Himalayas; between it and Animal-Land my brother rapidly invented the principal steamship routes. Soon there was a whole world and a map of that world which used every colour in my paint box. And those parts of that world which we regarded as our own – Animal-Land and India – were increasingly peopled with consistent characters.
In time Animal-Land and India were united into the single state of Boxen. Those who come to be as fond of Boxen as I am will perhaps share my regret that only a few of the earliest stories have survived. But all that has survived is in this book. For those who find the early writings tedious, I suggest they go direct to the first of what are called the ‘novels’ – Boxen: Or Scenes from Boxonian City Life.
There exist only three notebooks which contain Jack’s earliest stories of Boxen, and for convenience I will call them Notebooks I, II and III. It’s impossible to know exactly when any of the Boxen stories were written. However, in his incomplete Encyclopedia Boxoniana which Jack began in 1927, he mentions The King’s Ring as ‘almost certainly the oldest text’. Considering the position of this story in Notebook I and comparing it to some things I know to have been written in 1907, I’m fairly certain that The King’s Ring was written quite early in 1906. The adventures of Sir Peter Mouse in Manx Against Manx and The Relief of Murry provide an illustration of the shift from modern to medieval. They come from Notebook I and were possibly written in 1906.
King Bunny – or King Benjamin I – is one of the Boxen characters inspired by a toy. The interest in ‘knights-in-armour’ came from, amongst other sources, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sir Nigel which was serialised in The Strand Magazine from December 1905 to December 1906. Much of the vocabulary of The King’s Ring – such as ‘gossip’ for ‘friend’ – and the decision to make it a play were almost certainly in imitation of Shakespeare. In Notebook I Jack scribbled, ‘Who do you think wrote the best plays? I can form a good idea which poet wrote the best. When Shakespeare was alive he wrote the best, what play do you think was the best. I think Hamlet was.’
The years 1906–1907 were particularly happy for the Lewis family. Warnie had good reasons for disliking Wynyard School, but he was as delighted as anyone with Little Lea. In his letters to Jack he urged him to see that a cricket pitch was made in the garden. And Jack, for his part, kept Warnie abreast of the developments in Boxen. Many years later Warnie arranged the family papers into chronological order and typed them. When it was all finished, they were bound into eleven volumes and given the name Lewis Papers: Memoirs of the Lewis Family 1850–1930. It is from the Lewis Papers that I’ve drawn much of my information about Boxen and I’ve preserved the original spelling from Jack and Warnie’s letters. Jack had an unfortunate habit of not dating his, but in one to Warnie which was probably written in September 1906 he said: ‘At present Boxen is slightly convulsed. The news had just reached her that King Bunny is a prisoner. The colonists (who are of course the war party) are in a bad way: they dare scarcely leave their houses because of the mobs. In Tararo the Prussians and Boxonians are at fearful odds against each other and the natives. Such were the states of affairs recently: but the able general Quicksteppe is taking steps for the rescue of King Bunny. (The news somewhat pacified the rioters.)’19 For years there had been rumours of a possible war with Prussia, and it was natural that if King Benjamin I was to have enemies they might as well be the ones Jack heard so much about.
Readers of C.S. Lewis’s seven Chronicles of Narnia will know that after writing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the next four stories, h
e turned back to seek the origins of Narnia. Having found them, they were described in The Magician’s Nephew. Much the same happened with Boxen. Was anyone in Animal-Land before the reign of Benjamin I? How did they get to know the people of India? In a letter to Warnie of about June 1907 Jack said: ‘I am thinking of writeing a History of Mouse-land and I have even gon so far as to make up some of it, this is what I have made up. Mouse-land had a very long stone-age during which time no great things tooke place it lasted from 55 BC to 1212 and then king Bublich I began to reign, he was not a good king but he fought gainest yellow land. Bub II his son fought indai about the lantern act, died 1377 king Bunny came next.’20
The History of Mouse-Land from Stone-Age to Bublish I, published here from Notebook II does not go as far as the ‘lantern act’. Even so, I think this is probably the history which Jack was outlining. The other histories mentioned in the Encyclopedia are lost with the exception of what is about the first half of the one Jack considered the best. It is named in the Encyclopedia as the New History or the History of Animal-Land, and the story of how it survived is a pleasant little piece of earthly history. In 1953 Jack Lewis’s friend Lord David Cecil revealed that his eleven year-old son, Hugh, would be grateful if Jack would read the history of his invented world. Such was his pleasure in Hugh’s work that he lent him the History of Animal-Land. Fortunately, Hugh copied down as much of this history as he could before the manuscript had to be returned. He cannot regret more than I do that there was not time to transcribe it all. But because of Hugh Cecil much that we could never have known about Animal-Land is preserved.
A peculiarity of Mr Lewis’s was that he disliked intensely going on holidays and he usually pleaded pressure of work in order to avoid leaving Belfast. Mrs Lewis, on the other hand, enjoyed travelling and during September 1907 she took Jack and Warnie for a holiday in France. Writing to his father on the 4th September, Warnie said: ‘Jacks started a new book “Living races of Mouse-land” which will be very good when it is finished.’21 In emphasising ‘when’ Warnie meant that Jack often began stories which he never completed. There is much evidence of this in the Notebooks, but this is what you would expect of one gifted with such a lively and fertile imagination. When, as in this case, so many of the completed stories have vanished fragments often supply needed illumination. In Chapter IV of The Locked Door that most prominent of Frogs, Lord Big, honours Little-Master White from the island of Piscia as ‘the greatest Little-Master ever seen by Boxen’. It occurs to me that the following fragment from Notebook II entitled Life of Little Mr White may have been the first thing written about Little-Master White and Piscia. And is it not likely that the combination of ‘Little’ and ‘Mr’ suggested to Jack the title of ‘Little-Master’? The fragment says:
White as we know is of good qualitys as a frog, but strange to say is of poor lineage. Many people are under an error concerning his family history. He can be traced to the Bigs. His derect parents were farmers in the country of Frog-land, but his grand-father was the brother of Big’s father: thus Marshel Wite is conected with the famous Sir Big but was much younger. Mr Little was borne at slimey-bay in the reign of ‘King Mouse the Good’. Wite at the age of 10 left his school, and served Tom Anderson for 13 years. (Tom Anderson was a millar.) No sooner had he left Tom Anderson than he went into the Army.
During the Christmas holidays of 1907 nine-year-old Jack began the first of his diaries. Or, more accurately, his first autobiography as it bears the title My Life. As this happy family was soon to be shattered, Jack’s Life gives us a glimpse of what it was like at Little Lea before it changed so much. The servants at Little Lea included a house-maid named Maude Scott and a cook named Martha or ‘Mat’. Jack intended that the Life should be read by all in the house and it is dedicated ‘To Miss Maude Scott’. That was to prove very embarrassing because in the first paragraph he states: ‘I have a lot of enymays, however there are only 2 in this house they are called Maude and Mat, Maude is far worse than Mat, but she thinks she is a saint … I HATE Maude.’ He goes on to say: ‘Papy of course is the master of the house, and a man in whom you can see strong Lewis features, bad temper, very sensible, nice wen not in a temper. Mamy is like most middle-aged ladys, stout, brown hair, spectaciles, kniting her chief industry etc. etc. I am like most boys of 9 and I am like Papy, bad temper, thick lips, thin and generally weraing a jersey.’ After describing his pets (a mouse, a canary and a dog) he mentions his paternal grandfather: ‘I have left out an important member of the family namly my grand-father, who lives in a little room of his own up-stairs he is a nice old man in some ways but he pitys him-self rather much, however all old people do that.’
So great was his affection for Warnie that there is a section of the Life entitled ‘Part IV. How Warnie came home.’ As, however, Warnie had not yet arrived from Wynyard, Jack went on to write: ‘I am still looking forward to Warnie’s homecoming which is always a great event in our house. You see I had to wait for something to happen before I could write about it, and I put down “Part IV” “How Warnie came home” with out thinking … therefore I shall have to fill up “Part IV” with other things. I have yet left out another important person who plays a large part in “my life”, namely “Miss Harper” who is my governess. She is fairly nice FOR a governess, but all of them are the same. Miss Harper has fair hair, blue eyes, and rather sharp features, she generally wears a green blouse and a dress of the same hue.’ Included in the Life was a drawing of Miss Harper with a ‘balloon’ coming from her lips which contained the words ‘Don’t say can’t to me, Jacksie.’22
Miss Harper, a Presbyterian of a rather serious disposition, almost certainly read the Life. By way of an answer, she wrote in Notebook I a strongly-worded discourse on ‘Do as you would be done by.’ That arrow apparently found its target. Notebook II overlaps with number I and Jack scribbled in it, ‘I often wish that I was leading a more use-ful life.’
In 1908 Mrs Lewis began to feel ill. When she was operated on at Little Lea on the 15th February she was discovered to have cancer. For a while she seemed better. But it didn’t last and this brave lady died on the 23rd August 1908. Perhaps her virtues and her character are no where better summed up than in the first chapter of Surprised by Joy: ‘With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy, but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.’
Less than a month after their mother’s death Jack became Warnie’s fellow sufferer at Wynyard. They had no more idea than their parents that the Headmaster, Robert Capron, was insane. Besides his cruelty, it disappointed Jack that Capron’s teaching consisted of little more than ‘a shoreless ocean of arithmetic’. Years later, when I was Jack’s private secretary, he gave me Notebooks I and III – the first because it contained his first story of Animal-Land and the other because it was one of those he used at Wynyard for his prep. ‘Look at all that arithmetic!’ he said to me. ‘But,’ said I, ‘isn’t that algebra?’ ‘Is it?’ he exclaimed. ‘Then it was a shoreless ocean of arithemetic and algebra!’
During the Christmas holiday of 1908 Jack added considerably to Boxen. In Notebook II there is what was possibly the first map of Animal-Land and the other parts of that world. India is situated south of Animal-Land with Ceylon where it is in the real world. North of Animal-Land is Dolfin-Land and on the same latitude and east of Dolfin-Land is Pongee. Running through both these countries is the ‘Arctic Circle’ beyond which lies a vast expanse of ‘Unexplored Ice’. Also in Notebook II is Part I of The Chess Monograph. Part II is taken from Notebook III which Jack apparently overlooked when he was compiling his Encyclopedia. India had been discovered to be an inconvenient distance from Animal-Land and in the map drawn to go with The Geography of Animal-Land, in Notebook III, India has been pulled up so as to lie east of Animal-Land with the island of Piscia (formerly Frog-Land) in between.
/> It was during their year together at Wynyard that Warnie began a Boxonian newspaper, and while no issues have survived, it was probably during 1908–1909 that Jack’s The Murry Chronicle and The Murry Evening Telegraph began ‘publication’. And with the newspapers came some of Jack’s most detailed drawings of such notables as Lord Big, Viscount Puddiphat and James Bar. Excepting those pictures which were drawn in the ‘novels’, some of the best illustrations were drawn on loose sheets of paper and collected in 1926 into the two volumes of Leborough Studies. As most are dated as having been drawn between 1908–1910 it would seem that these years formed a high point in Boxen’s creation. The pity is that we don’t have the stories the drawings were intended to illustrate.
Warnie won his freedom from Wynyard after the summer term of 1909 and in September of that year he entered Malvern College. Deprived of his fellow Boxen enthusiast, Jack began a ‘medieval’ novel entitled The Ajimywanian War. After the friendly dressed animals of Boxen, what he wrote of this story in which all the characters are human is unexpectedly dull. It was copied into the Lewis Papers (vol. III, pp. 162–164). About the same time he created a series of small territories around the ‘Ilonian Sea’. The fragment of the story, with a detailed map, about these far-eastern territories is found in Notebook III. But it contains none of the delights of Boxen, and this may explain why it never got very far. But these inventions, while totally un-Boxonian in character, found a small place in Boxen. The country in which the Ajimywanian War took place was Ojimywania and the only map we have of Clarendon (which is in the ‘South Seas’ and west of Tararo) is called ‘Clarendon or Ojimywania’ One of the territories bordering the Ilonian Sea is Gleonarphy. Although it sounds like a desert, it must have been perfect for growing tobacco. When, in Littera Scripta Manet (‘The Written Word Abides’), Lord Big offers General Quicksteppe one of his best cigars (kept in a safe) it is ‘one of the Gleonarphies’.
