C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Walter Hooper

by critics and readers of a different tradition and may well be rediscovered and reinstated, perhaps even higher than anyone expects, in some future shake-up of the kaleidoscope of literature. At present the seven Chronicles of Narnia, that unexpected creation of his middle age, which are selling over a million copies a year, seem to be Lewis’s greatest claim to immortality, setting him high in that particular branch of literature in which few attain more than a transitory or an esoteric fame – somewhere on the same shelf as Lewis Carroll and E. Nesbit and George MacDonald, as Kipling and Kenneth Grahame and Andrew Lang: a branch of literature in which there are relatively few great classics but in which, as he himself said, ‘the good ones last’.

      And so we offer our humble tribute to a great man, an important and interesting writer, an inspiring teacher – and above all such a friend as we are not likely to find again.

      

      ROGER LANCELYN GREEN

      WALTER HOOPER

       ABBREVIATIONS

      AMR = All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C.S. Lewis 1922–1927, ed. Walter Hooper (1991)

      BF = Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis, ed. Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead (1982)

      CG = Walter Hooper, C.S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide (1996)

      FL = Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Volume I, Family Letters 1905–1931, ed. Walter Hooper (2000)

      LP = unpublished ‘Lewis Papers’ or ‘Memoirs of the Lewis Family: 1850–1930’ in 11 volumes

      ‘Memoir’ = Memoir by W.H. Lewis contained in Letters of C.S. Lewis, ed. with a Memoir by W.H. Lewis (1966), and reprinted in Letters of C.S. Lewis, ed. with a Memoir by W.H. Lewis, revised and enlarged edition, ed. Walter Hooper (1988)

      SBJ = C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955)

      TST = They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914–1963), ed. Walter Hooper (1979)

       PROLOGUE ANCESTRY

      ‘Live in Hope and die in Caergwrle’ says the pun still current in these two North Wales villages between Hawarden and Wrexham in Flintshire. C.S. Lewis’s great-great-grandfather, Richard Lewis (c. 1775–1845), fulfilled at least the second part of this dictum, though he was probably also born in Caergwrle and was certainly a farmer there for most of his life. He had one daughter and six sons, the fourth of whom, Joseph (1803?–1890) – a farmer like his father – moved some miles north-east and settled at Saltney, then still a little village just south of Chester.

      The family were members of the Church of England until Joseph, thinking he was not being given the prominence that was his due in the parish, seceded and became a Methodist minister. Farming must have been merely the necessary means of supplementing the scanty tribute of his congregation, for it is as a Methodist minister that he is remembered, and in this capacity he enjoyed a considerable local reputation. Though the handwriting and letters of Joseph Lewis are not those of an educated man, it is recorded that he was an impressive speaker of an emotional type.

      Of Joseph’s eight children, it is his fourth son, Richard (1832–1908), who first emigrated to Ireland, where he found work in the Cork Steamship Company as a master boiler maker. Richard was one of the working-class intelligentsia in the fore of that artisan renaissance of which the chief symptoms in the 1860s were the birth of the Trades Union and Co-operative movements. In his concern for the elevation of the working classes, he set about improving his education, and writing essays for the edification of fellow members of the Workmen’s Reading Room in the Steamship Company. Most of his essays were theological and are remarkably eloquent for a man who had had so little education. Though he had returned to the Anglican Church, his essays were sufficiently evangelical to satisfy his Methodist father.

      In 1853 Richard married Martha Gee (1831–1903) of Liverpool. Their six children, Martha (1854–1860), Sarah Jane (1856?–1901), Joseph (1856–1908), William (1859–1946), Richard (b. 1861), and Albert James, were all born in Cork. Albert (1863–1929), the father of C.S. Lewis, was born on 23 August 1863, and in 1864 his father proceeded to Dublin to take up a better job. His new position was something like an ‘outside manager’ in the shipbuilding firm of Messrs Walpole, Webb and Bewly.

      In 1868 Richard moved with his family to Belfast where he and John H. MacIlwaine entered into partnership, trading under the name of MacIlwaine and Lewis: Boiler Makers, Engineers, and Iron Ship Builders. The business was a success, for a time anyway, and in 1870 the Lewises moved from the area of Mount Pottinger to the more fashionable one of Lower Sydenham.

      Whether it was because of his early precocity or because of the rising fortunes of the family, his father was induced to give Albert a more elaborate education than had been bestowed on his three brothers. After leaving the District Model National School he went in 1877, when he was fourteen, to Lurgan College in Co. Armagh. This was a fortunate choice and was to have far-reaching effects, for the headmaster of Lurgan College at this time was W.T. Kirkpatrick – the ‘Great Knock’ who was to play an important part in C.S. Lewis’s life, and of whom we shall hear more in the course of this narrative. Kirkpatrick was thirty-one at the time and a brilliant teacher. He seems to have taken Albert under his wing, and, once it was decided that the boy would pursue a legal career, he set about preparing him for it.

Albert left Lurgan College in 1879 and was articled the day after leaving school to the law firm of Maclean, Boyle and Maclean in Dublin. Kirkpatrick had inspired him to continue his general education, and most evenings were set aside for the study of literature, composition, logic and history. In 1881 he joined the Belmont Literary Society and was soon considered one of its best speakers. One member predicted that ‘Since Mr Lewis joined the Society his matrimonial prospects have gone up 20 per cent’,¹ little knowing that they had been quite high since he first met Miss Edie Macown when he went off to Lurgan. Both, it seems, were more ‘in love with love’ than with one another, and by 1884 Edie had faded out of Albert’s life.

      The following year Albert qualified as a solicitor and, after a brief partnership, started a practice of his own in Belfast which he conducted with uniform success for the rest of his life.

      

      On returning to Belfast, Albert was united not only with his family but with their neighbours, the Hamiltons. When the Lewises moved to Lower Sydenham in 1870 they had become members of the parish of St Mark’s, Dundela. Four years later the church acquired a new rector, the Reverend Thomas Hamilton. Richard Lewis was always a stern critic of Thomas Hamilton’s sermons, but the young Lewises and the young Hamiltons became warm friends immediately. Whereas the Lewises sprang from Welsh farmers and were, despite their evangelical Christianity, materially minded, the Hamiltons were a family of reputable antiquity with a strong ecclesiastical tradition.

      The Irish branch of the Hamilton family was descended from one Hugh Hamilton who settled at Lisbane, Co. Down, in the time of James I and was one of the Hamiltons of Evandale, of whom Sir James Hamilton of Finnart (d. 1540) was an ancestor. His great-great-grandson (Thomas’s grandfather) was Hugh Hamilton (1729–1805), successively a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, Dean of Armagh, Bishop of Clonfert, and, finally, Bishop of Ossory. In 1772 Hugh married Isabella, eldest daughter of Hans Widman Wood. Their fifth son, also named Hugh (1790–1865), was likewise educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He was ordained in 1813, and was Rector of Inishmacsaint, Co. Fermanagh. He married Elizabeth, daughter of the Right Hon. John Staples, and their second son, Thomas, was the grandfather of C.S. Lewis.

      Thomas Robert Hamilton, born on 28 June 1826, took a First in Theology at Trinity