Prince Caspian Chapter 1: “The Island”

Narnia Read-Along Vol. 2, Issue 2

Pauline Baynes illustration

Inspiration of “The Island”

In the late 1940s, when C.S. Lewis began the development of “The Chronicles of Narnia” in earnest¹, he also began another writing project—his spiritual autobiography.

Lewis started on Surprised by Joy in the spring of 1948. This mental return to his childhood seemingly sparked his imagination. A few months later he restarted his efforts at a children’s fantasy, which became The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

While he contends he didn’t start with a series in mind, Lewis did begin a sequel almost immediately after completing LWW in the spring of 1949. Those early attempts didn’t fully pan out, but some elements made their way into later Narnia books. And that summer, Lewis began Prince Caspian, finishing it that fall.

For the next six years, he completed Narnia while writing his autobiography, finishing the last book in the series (The Magician’s Nephew) in early 1954 and Surprised by Joy in 1955.

It's not surprising that as Lewis dwelt on his early life filled with stories, both those written by others and the ones he and his brother Warnie composed, his imaginative writing would move toward children. He described himself as being “the product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs 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.”

That, however, was his childhood before his mother’s death and his subsequently being sent to boarding school. You can see how Lewis’ mind inextricably linked the two events. Flora died on August 23, 1908. Less than a month later, 9-year-old “Jack” was sent away to Wynyard School, which Lewis calls a “concentration camp” in Surprised by Joy.

Wynyard was already in an enrollment decline because of court proceedings against the headmaster, Robert Capron, for a severe beating of a child a few years earlier. Unfortunately, the physical abuse of students did not improve but the educational environment worsened. Both Lewis and his brother suffered additional anti-Irish bias at Wynyard. Two years after the younger brother first enrolled, the continued falling enrollment forced Capron to sell the school.

Eventually, as they moved to different schools, things improved for Warnie. He was the more athletic of the two brothers. The clumsier Lewis struggled on sporting fields and in broaching the hierarchical system at his schools. On one of his first few days at one school, everyone was scrambling trying to find their assigned clubs for the various games. An older boy told Lewis that he was in the same club as him. Lewis dutifully went to those club meetings before finding out a week or two later that the boy had lied to him. When the club leaders, comprised of older students, called Lewis to be punished they said, “Who are you? Nobody.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is also the time period when Lewis decides to reject the faith of his family and formally become an atheist.

Is it any wonder that as Lewis was dwelling on these memories, his schooldays comprise almost half of Surprised by Joy, that his attitude toward boarding school seeped into the Narnia books? Almost all of them contain derogatory remarks toward schooling. In LWW, Professor Kirke asks mockingly, “What do they teach in school these days?” Here in Prince Caspian, the Pevensie children are in the middle of the journey to school, with Lucy going for the first time. They’re described as “all rather gloomy and no one could think of anything to say.”²

The Narnia adventures provided a way for Lewis to redeem and restore his own childhood. These are the journeys he wished he’d been able to go on instead of trudging off to schools that sought to beat and humiliate all the creativity and faith out of him. He often said that those schools did teach him one thing—the type of person he did not want to become. With Narnia, he was able to develop the other side. What would it look like to be part of an adventure that could prepare you to become the person you were created to be?

In the first chapter of Prince Caspian, we can see how Narnia has already changed the Pevensie children, but we also see how small choices they make can move them toward a positive end or drag them further away. The seeds that come to fruition in The Last Battle are already starting to bud early in the second book.