Contents
The Magician's Nephew
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The Magician's Nephew.jpg)
Cover of first edition (hardcover)
Author C. S. Lewis
Illustrator Pauline Baynes
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Series The Chronicles of Narnia
Genre(s) Fantasy, Children's Literature
Publisher The Bodley Head
Publication date 1955
Media type Print (Hardcover, Paperback)
Pages 202 pp
Preceded by The Horse and His Boy
Followed by The Last Battle
The Magician's Nephew is a fantasy novel for children written by C. S. Lewis. It was the sixth book published in his The Chronicles of Narnia series, but is the first in the internal chronology of the Narnia novels' fictional universe.
The novel begins in London in the early 1900s. The principal characters are two pre-adolescent children, Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer, Digory being the boy who becomes the Professor Kirke appearing in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Last Battle. The pair are transported to other worlds by the magical experiments of Digory's selfish Uncle Andrew and become caught up in the creation of Narnia and the introduction there of the evil witch-queen Jadis, antagonist of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Although begun shortly after The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the novel took Lewis nearly six years to complete, and includes a number of autobiographical elements from Lewis's own life. It explores several Christian themes, including atonement, original sin, temptation and the order of nature.
The book is dedicated to "the Kilmer family".
Plot summary
The story begins in London around 1900. Two children, Digory Kirke and Polly Plummer, meet while playing in the adjacent gardens of a row of terraced houses. They decide to explore an attic connecting the houses, but take the wrong door and surprise Digory's Uncle Andrew in his study. Uncle Andrew, a bumbling yet malevolent magician, tricks Polly into touching a yellow magic ring, causing her to vanish. He then blackmails Digory into rescuing Polly by using another yellow ring, while giving him two green rings for their return.
Digory finds himself in a wood among many pools of water, and is reunited with Polly. They realize that the yellow rings transport their wearers to the wood, which serves as an interdimensional junction — much like how the attic in London allows one to enter any of the houses connected to it. Jumping into a pool of water while wearing a green ring takes them to a different universe. Digory convinces Polly to explore other worlds before returning to Earth.
After marking the pool leading back to Earth, they enter a pool and find themselves in a crumbling palace among the ruins of the ancient world of Charn. They find a hall lined with statues of former rulers, progressing from the fair and wise to the proud and cruel. They also find a bell, marked by a sign that dares one to ring the bell while warning against doing so. Digory falls for the taunt and rings the bell against Polly's wishes. Its sound awakens the last of the statues, the evil Queen Jadis.
The Queen describes a final war between herself and her sister. When defeat seemed certain, Jadis spoke the Deplorable Word, destroying all life on Charn and leaving her to become Queen of a dead world. She cast a spell to petrify herself until the bell was rung. Realizing her evil nature, the children flee back through the wood to home, but Jadis follows and is pulled with them to London.
Digory and Polly finally succeed in extracting Jadis from London, but their return to the wood also brings along Uncle Andrew, a cab driver named Frank, and his horse, Strawberry. Digory leads them into the nearest pool, where they find an empty blackness, which Jadis recognizes as a world not yet created. They hear singing, which causes stars to appear and the sun to rise. The singer is Aslan, the great Lion. Aslan breathes life into the world, causing animals and plants to emerge from the earth. Jadis attacks Aslan, but finding the lion invulnerable, she flees. Aslan selects some animals to become intelligent talking beasts, giving them authority over the dumb beasts.
Aslan offers Digory the opportunity to atone for bringing the evil of Jadis into Narnia, and sends him and Polly upon Strawberry, whom he transforms into a talking winged horse, Fledge. They fly to a mountain to retrieve a magic apple from a walled garden. There they find Jadis, who has already eaten one of the apples, thereby gaining eternal youth, as well as gaining the palid white color that will define her in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. She tempts Digory to eat an apple or to use it to cure his dying mother. Although sorely tempted, Digory refuses, believing that his mother would not condone theft.
Upon their return, Aslan congratulates Digory and tells him to plant the apple. Aslan then crowns Frank and his wife Helen (whom Aslan has transported from Earth) the first King and Queen of Narnia. The apple grows into a tree, which Aslan explains will protect Narnia from the Witch for a time. He also explains that a stolen apple would have cured his mother, but at a terrible price. Aslan then gives Digory an apple from the tree to save his mother. Upon returning to London Digory cures his mother with the apple and then buries the core in his back yard. He also buries the rings around the apple core to prevent their misuse.
The apple core grows into a tree, and years later the tree is blown down in a storm. Digory has it made into a wardrobe, linking the narrative to the The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in which Digory is the "old professor" in whose country house Lucy Pevensie finds the wardrobe and the way into Narnia.
Chapters
- 01 - The Wrong Door
- 02 - Digory and His Uncle
- 03 - The Wood Between the Worlds
- 04 - The Bell and the Hammer
- 05 - The Deplorable Word
- 06 - The Beginning of Uncle Andrew's Troubles
- 07 - What Happened at the Front Door
- 08 - The Fight at the Lamp Post
- 09 - The Founding of Narnia
- 10 - The First Joke and Other Matters
- 11 - Digory and His Uncle are Both in Trouble
- 12 - Strawberry's Adventure
- 13 - An Unexpected Meeting
- 14 - The Planting of the Tree
- 15 - The End of This Story and the Beginning of All the Others
Principal characters
Writing
Lewis had originally intended only to write the one Narnia novel, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Roger Lancelyn Green, however, asked him how a lamp post came to be sitting in the midst of Narnian woodland. Lewis was intrigued enough by this question to attempt an answer by writing The Magician's Nephew, featuring a younger version of Professor Kirke from the first novel.[1]
The Magician's Nephew seems to have been the most challenging Narnia novel for Lewis to write. While the other six books were written quickly between 1948 and 1953, The Magician's Nephew occupied him over a six-year period between 1949 and 1954. He commenced in the summer of 1949 after finishing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but came to a halt after producing 26 pages of manuscript, and did not resume work until two years later. The autobiographical aspects of the novel may have been part of the problem.[2]
Lewis returned to The Magician's Nephew late in 1950, after completing The Silver Chair. He finished nearly three quarters of the novel, but halted once again after Green, to whom Lewis at this time showed all his writing, pointed out a structural flaw in the story. After finishing The Last Battle in 1953, Lewis again returned to The Magician's Nephew, completing it early in 1954.[3]
Lewis originally titled the novel Polly and Digory; his publisher changed it to The Magician's Nephew.[4]
The Lefay Fragment
A draft of the opening of the novel survives as the "Lefay Fragment". It differs significantly from the published version and was evidently abandoned by Lewis. The fragment is named for one of its characters, Mrs Lefay, Digory's fairy godmother, who does not appear in the final version (though the name is retained for Uncle Andrew's godmother).[5]
In the Lefay Fragment Digory is born with the ability to speak to trees and animals. He lives with his officious and bullying Aunt Gertrude, formerly a school mistress and now a government minister. Digory finds respite from Gertrude with his trees and animals, including a talking squirrel named Pattertwig. Polly enters the story as the girl next door, who is unable to understand the speech of non-human creatures. She wants to build a raft to explore a stream that leads to an underground world. Digory helps construct the raft, but to complete it without losing face with Polly, he saws a branch from a talking tree, thereby losing his supernatural powers of speech. The following day he is visited by his Godmother, Mrs Lefay, who knows that Digory has lost his ability. She gives him a card with the address of a furniture shop and instructs him to visit it. At this point the fragment ends.[6]
Mrs Lefay, Pattertwig and Aunt Gertrude do not appear in the final version of the novel. Pattertwig, however, does appears as a Narnian creature in Prince Caspian, and Aunt Gertrude resurfaces as the Head of the experimental school in The Silver Chair.[7]
Authenticity
Some doubt has been cast on the authenticity of The Lefay Fragment, as the handwriting in the manuscript differs in some ways from Lewis's usual style, and the writing is not of a calibre similar to his other work. Also, in August 1963 Lewis had given instructions to Douglas Gresham to destroy all his unfinished manuscripts when his rooms at Magdalene College Cambridge were being cleaned out following his resignation from the college.[8]
Autobiographical elements
Several aspects of The Magician's Nephew parallel Lewis's own life. Both Digory and Lewis were children in the early 1900s, both wanted a pony, and both faced the death of their mothers in childhood. Digory is separated from his father, who is in India, and misses him. Lewis was schooled in the United Kingdom after his mother’s death, while his father remained in Ireland. He also had a brother in India. Lewis was a voracious reader, as is Digory, and both are better with books than with numbers. Digory (and Polly) struggle with sums when trying to work out how far they must travel along the attic space to explore an abandoned house. Lewis failed the maths entrance exam for Oxford. Lewis remembered dreary rainy summer days from his youth, and Digory is faced with the same woe in the novel. Additionally Digory becomes a professor when he grows up, who (like Lewis) takes in evacuated children during World War Two.[9]
Digory (especially in his appearance in later books as "Professor Kirke") has mannerisms similar to Lewis' tutor, William Kirkpatrick, whom he calls "Kirk" in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy.
The character of Uncle Andrew closely resembles Robert Capron, a schoolmaster at Wynyard School which Lewis attended with his brother. Lewis suggested in his teens that Capron would make a good model for a villain in a future story. Ketterly resembles Capron in his age, appearance and behaviour.[10]
Style
The Magician's Nephew is lighter in tone than other Narnia books, in particular The Last Battle, which was published after The Magician's Nephew. This perhaps reflects Lewis looking back at an earlier part of the century with affection, recalling his childhood during the time when the book is set. There are a number of humorous references to life in the old days, particularly to school life. Humorous exchanges also take place between Narnian animals. Jadis's attempt to conquer London is more comical than sinister, juxtaposing the evil empress of fairy tale with Edwardian London and its social mores. This recalls the style of Edith Nesbit's children's books,[11] which Lewis was fond of; a number were set in the same period; and The Magician's Nephew in several places pays apparent homage to them.[4]
Reading order
The Magician's Nephew was originally published as the sixth book in the Narnia Chronicles. Reprintings of the novels until the 1980s reflected the order of original publication. In 1980 HarperCollins published the series in the chronological order of the events in the novels, which meant that The Magician's Nephew was renumbered as first in the series. In 1994 HarperCollins, who had previously published editions of the novels outside the United States, acquired the rights to publish the novels in that country as well, and used the chronological sequence in the uniform worldwide edition published in that year.[12]