|
|
 |
 |
During the Second World War, when children from London were being evacuated to the country, four youngsters were billeted at Jack's home, the Kilns. Surprised to find how few imaginative stories his young guests seemed to know, he decided to write one for them and scribbled down the opening sentences of a story about four children -- then named Ann, Martin, Rose and Peter -- who were sent away from London because of the air raids, and went to stay with a very old professor who lived by himself in the country.
That's all he wrote at the time, but, several years later, he returned to the story. The children (now named Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy) found their way into another world -- a land he would eventually call Narnia.
|
 |
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was published in 1950 with illustrations by Pauline Baynes, a young artist who perfectly captured, in line, the pictures that Jack Lewis had seen in his head.
|
 |
Jack experimented with the differences in time between our world and Narnia -- a device that meant that there was always something unusual and unexpected about each new story.
|
 |
"When I had done The Voyage," Jack later recalled, "I felt quite sure it would be the last. But I found I was wrong."
|
 |
In 1953, he wrote The Silver Chair, and the following year, The Horse and His Boy, which was set during the time period of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Each book introduced memorable new Narnian characters -- such as Reepicheep the Mouse, Trumpkin the Dwarf and Puddleglum the Marsh-wiggle - and, from this world, the plucky Jill Pole and the unpleasant Eustace Scrubb, who gets turned into a dragon.
|
 |
As for the "magnificent lion," he plays an important role in every story: in The Magician's Nephew, he gives life to Narnia; in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, he defeats the evil of the White Witch; and in the final volume of what is now known as "The Chronicles of Narnia" (The Last Battle) Aslan concludes the story of Narnia and leads its faithful friends to a new world.
|
|
|
|
