you have a little fencing match with me? It would be frightfully decent.” ‘
183 The Silver Chair.
184 Sir Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (1819).
185 See the letter to Bodle of 31 December 1947 (CL II, p. 823).
186 The name given to the planet Earth in Lewis’s interplanetary trilogy.
187 Roger Lancelyn Green, Tellers of Tales: An Account of Children’s Favourite Authors from 1839 to the Present Day (1946; new edn, 1953).
188 For Don Giovanni Calabria’s letter of 3 September 1953 see Letters: C. S. Lewis-Don Giovanni Calabria, pp. 84-7.
189 Giovanni Calabria, Instaurare Omnia in Christo (Verona: Vescovile Casa Buoni Fanciulli, 1952).
190 Horace, Ars Poetica, 169-74: ‘Multa senem circumveniunt incommoda, vel quod quaerit et inventis miser abstinet ac timet uti,/vel quod res omnis timide gelideque ministrat,/dilator, spe longus, iners, avidusque futuri,/difficilis, querulus, laudator temporis acti/se puero, castigator censorque minorum’: ‘Many troubles assail an old man, whether because he seeks gain, and then wretchedly abstains from what he possesses and is afraid to use it, or because he attends to all his affairs feebly and timidly; a procrastinator, he is apathetic in his hopes and expectations, sluggish and fearful of the future, obstinate, always complaining; he devotes himself to praising times past, when he was a boy, and to being the castigator and moral censor of the young.’
191 2 Corinthians 1:3.
192 This had been Lewis’s chief intention in The Abolition of Man.
193 Herbert Read, The Green Child (1935).
194 The French composer, Olivier Messiaen (1908-92).
195 Probably Douglas Edison Harding, author of The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth.
196 In The Hone and His Boy.
197 ibid., ch. 7.
198 Lewis was referring to Rachel, son of Laban. According to Genesis 29:20: ‘Jacob served seven years for Rachel.’ In her note to his letter Pitter said: ‘I had now known Lewis for seven years, and thought perhaps he would not mind if we now used Xtian names…I had asked “if I might now have Rachel”, alluding to Jacob’s seven-year service’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 119).
199 The foolish clergyman in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), who is excessively obsequious to persons of high rank.
200 G. A. L. Burgeon (Owen Barfield), This Ever Diverse Pair, introduction by Walter de la Mare (London: Gollancz, 1950). See the description of this book in CL II, p. 937n.
201 Charlotte M. Yonge, The Daisy Chain (1856); The Trial (1864); The Pillars of the House (1873); The Three Brides (1876); The Two Sides of the Shield (1885); Dynevor Terrace (1857); Nutty’s Father (1886).
202 John Richards (1918-95) was born in London on 23 June 1918. He went to Brockley County School in Forest Hill, after which he read English at King’s College, London. Before he could complete his degree the Second World War intervened and he spent most of the war years working in an anti-aircraft battery in Northern Ireland. After VE Day Richards was transferred to the Foreign Office. He soon left, returning to King’s College to complete his degree. In 1949 he realized his long-time ambition and began work in the Ministry of Education, where he served as Under-Secretary, 1973-7. A convert to Roman Catholicism in 1940, he afterwards contributed to many Catholic periodicals. See Lewis’s letter to Richards of 5 March 1945 in the Supplement.
203 Charlotte M. Yonge, The Heir of Redclyffe (1853).
204 i.e., The Splendid Century.
205 John Forrest, who had just died, was the husband of Lewis’s cousin, Gundreda Ewart Forrest. See The Ewart Family in the Biographical Appendix to CL I.
206 The words ‘better the frying pan than the fire’ were removed from The Silver Chair before the book was published.
207 Lewis had probably been asked to examine J. B. Phillips’s translation of Acts, The Young Church in Action: The Acts of the Apostles, published by Geoffrey Bles in 1955. The reference is to Phillips’s translation of Acts 2:22-4.
208 The fourteenth-century manor Dartington Hall was bought in 1925 by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst, who opened it in 1926 as an experiment in co-education. From the first one of its purposes was to renovate the large Dartington Hall estate. The school featured a ‘pupil-defined curriculum’ based upon the individual. There were few rules for older students, no uniforms, no religious education, and no church services. Emphasis was placed on ‘co-operation rather than competition’. Lewis’s pupil, Mary Neylan, taught there for a number of years. See Mary Neylan in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1054-5.
209 The school in The Silver Chair.
210 Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1850).
211 ‘for the prayers’.
212 Congregation of Sisters of the Holy Redeemer, a lay order within the Order of the Holy Cross.
213 Book of Common Prayer, Collect for Whitsunday.
214 The story is told of a friend saying to Sir Winston Churchill,