The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: Chapter 12 “The Dark Island”

C.S. Lewis Read-Along, Vol. 3, Issue 13

Background: Because C.S. Lewis dealt with terrible nightmares as a child, he was always concerned that his stories would help children deal with their fears and not provoke them. This led him to make the most substantial post-publication edit to any book in The Chronicles of Narnia to “The Dark Island.”

Foreground: While everyone else was looking at the beam of light, Lucy looked along it and saw something no one else saw. In one of his more important essays, Lewis wrote about how we gain knowledge from personal experience, looking along, not just by scientific study, looking at.

Quote: “Lucy leant her head on the edge of the fighting-top and whispered, ‘Aslan, Aslan, if ever you loved us at all, send us help now.’ The darkness did not grow any less, but she began to feel a little—a very, very little—better. ‘After all, nothing has really happened to us yet,’ she thought.”

Pauline Baynes illustration

Background: “The Dark Island”

In Surprised by Joy, Lewis describes his early childhood as idyllic with “one exception”— recurring nightmares. “I remember nothing earlier than the terror of certain dreams. It is a very common trouble at that age, yet it still seems to me odd that petted and guarded childhood should so often have in it a window opening on what is hardly less than Hell.”

His terrifying dreams usually involved ghosts and insects, but he said those featured bugs were the worst for him. “To this day I would rather meet a ghost than a tarantula,” he wrote. Even as an adult, he said he feared poverty but not as much as “large spiders and the tops of cliffs.”

In “On Three Ways of Writing for Children” republished in Of Other Worlds, he takes seriously the idea that fairy tales could scare young readers. “I suffered too much from night-fears myself in childhood to undervalue this objection. I would not wish to heat the fears of that private hell for any child,” he wrote. But he draws a distinction between irrational phobias, like his fear of insects, and the truth that we are all “born into a world of death, violence, wounds, adventure, heroism and cowardice, good and evil.”

He didn’t believe phobias could be controlled by “literary means.” An image in a book may set off a fear but could just as easily be sparked from something else. “It would be nice if no little boy in bed, hearing, or thinking he hears, a sound, were ever at all frightened,” he wrote. “But if he is going to be frightened, I think it better that he should think of giants and dragons than merely of burglars. And I think St George, or any bright champion in armor, is a better comfort than the idea of the police.”

Lewis concludes this diversion in his essay by saying he wouldn’t trade away fairy tales even if it meant he could’ve avoided all his bad dreams. “If I could have escaped all my own night-fears at the price of never having known ‘faerie’, would I now be the gainer by that bargain? I am not speaking carelessly. The fears were very bad. But I think the price would have been too high.”

“If I could have escaped all my own night-fears at the price of never having known ‘faerie’, would I now be the gainer by that bargain? I am not speaking carelessly. The fears were very bad. But I think the price would have been too high.”
— C.S. Lewis “On Three Ways of Writing for Children”

With this in mind, it is no wonder that Lewis included Dark Island, where dreams come true, in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. But he wrestled with how children would respond and how he should frame the ship’s return to safety, which is why—depending on the copy of Dawn Treader you read—we could’ve read different versions.¹