Busting a myth – was Greville’s wardrobe the inspiration for the wardrobe in C.S. Lewis’s book ‘The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe’?
Research: FAM volunteer
We would love this myth to be true – here is what we know.
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During WWI Ashton Court was a Red Cross hospital for wounded officers. The young 20 year old C.S. Lewis was a patient at Ashton Court from the 25th of June to the 4th of October 1918.
The Chronicles of Narnia were written between 1949 and 1954, more than 30 years after his short stay in Ashton Court.
Image: courtesy of https://www.wheaton.edu/academics/academic-centers/wadecenter/plan-your-visit/museum/featured-museum-artifacts/
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The wardrobe at his family home in Belfast figured largely in his young life.
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It had been handmade by Lewis’s paternal grandfather. As a child Lewis, his brother and cousins would play in the wardrobe. Later Lewis had it transported from the family home in Belfast to his adult home ‘The Kilns’ in England.
Images: ©unknown
Here is Greville’s wardrobe at Ashton Court. Image from the 1970s before it was dismantled.
It is certainly more capacious than the Lewis family wardrobe!
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Would C.S. Lewis have seen Greville’s wardrobe during his stay at Ashton Court? Yes, it is most likely that he did see it.
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Greville had died in 1901 and Emily in 1915 so their suite of rooms overlooking the south lawn were unused and presumably unoccupied. In 1917 when Ashton Court was first converted to a Red Cross Hospital Esme removed herself and her staff to Ness Castle.
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During C.S. Lewis’s stay at Ashton Court he wrote letters to his father and to his Irish friend and neighbour Arthur. On the 29th of June 1918 he wrote to his father:
“… I was very miserable for the first few days until I discovered a little, almost disused writing room at one end of the house. Here I can sit in comparative safety and read Burton’s anatomy [Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy] which I have had sent from town …
… Greatly to my chagrin the library is locked up. …
… The house here is the survival, tho’ altered by continual building …but we have one or two fine old paintings and a ghost …”
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Of the published letters to his father and Arthur these are the only specific mentions of the interior of Ashton Court that Lewis made.
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Lt. Col. Essex-Lewis, who was there from December 1918 to June 1919, so shortly after C.S. Lewis, recalled that ‘the leg cases were downstairs’. Essex-Lewis had a shrapnel wound and was upstairs in a bedroom on the south front. He recalled that:
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“We had complete run of the house; as far as I remember, there was nothing very remarkable about the pictures and furniture. It all seemed rather tawdry, second-rate stuff. We saw nothing of the Smyth family.”
Similar to Essex-Lewis, C.S. Lewis suffered shrapnel wounds, not life-threatening but enough for him to be returned to England to recover, and similarly he was probably housed upstairs at Ashton Court.
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Maybe Ashton Court reminded Lewis of his childhood home Little Lea in Belfast as described by Alister McGrath in his biography of Lewis:
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“For two years, the solitary Lewis roamed the large house’s long, creaking corridors and roomy attics, with vast quantities of books as his companions. Lewis’s inner world began to take shape.”
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In conclusion, it is probable that Lewis explored Ashton Court when he was able, and was housed in an upstairs bedroom. It is likely that he saw Greville’s wardrobe and maybe even compared it to the old family wardrobe back home in Belfast. However, he did not leave any written record that it had made a lasting impression on him, or specifically influenced him when he came to write the Chronicles of Narnia many years later.
References
Bristol Archives 41648/P 1/59. Recollections of Lt. Col Essex-Lewis.
Bristol Archives 41648/P 2/13 Notes on the Red Cross Hospital (including photocopies of parts of the Collected letters of C.S. Lewis).
CS. Lewis: a life/Alister McGrath https://www.tyndale.com/sites/ww2reads/book/cs-lewis-a-life/ [accessed 2024]