As for who Digory Kirke as the professor is based on, quite a few people think he based Professor Digory Kirke on his tutor, ''the Great Knock'', William Kirkpatrick. If this is true, We can use an image I provided of him to take in mind what people would have been wearing and what he looked like at 71. He died at 72 years of age. He was 66-68 when he tutored Lewis. Frankly, I think Digory's clothes should be based on what C.S. Lewis wore as a 12 year old in the 1900s. I would definitely take my inspiration from ''The Reluctant Convert'' movie. I fully suspect that even if Lewis got years wrong, he was talking about Digory wearing clothes similar to the clothes he would have worn as a child.

Now back on topic, what about the children during that time, especially for Digory and Polly? It makes you wonder what kind of outfit they would have worn.

Maybe people aged differently in the early-mid twentieth century. They didn't have as many regulations about pollution and hazardous chemicals, and they smoked, drank, and lived generally unhealthy lifestyles. The free radicals and other health problems caused by that would probably be higher than today.

That's an interesting theory, but I'd say it's fairly tenuous. One could just as easily argue that, at least among those who were reasonably well-off financially and didn't live in heavily polluted urban areas, many people would have had a healthier lifestyle than the average person today — far fewer highly processed foods, a lot more walking and less driving, and so on.

Also, someone who is in their 50s could still have gray hair and other age-associated traits. In 1950, the life expectancy of the UK was only 69 so 50 would be pretty old back then.

That's average life expectancy, which doesn't mean that most people in 1950 lived to "only 69"; it simply means that out of people born in that particular year, roughly half could expect to die before the age of 69 and half could expect to live longer, if mortality rates at that period remain the same into the future (which they usually don't). Life expectancy has gone up since 1950 and plenty of people born in that year (or a few years earlier, like both my parents) have already lived to well over 69! Also, in any period up until a fair way into the 20th century, average life expectancy is dragged down hugely by the much higher child mortality rates. Put simply, because so many more people died in childhood or infancy, the average age of death comes down much lower — but anyone who survived to adulthood had a good chance of living a long life. The two World Wars, which led to huge numbers of people (especially men) dying young, would affect the statistics for those periods too.

I'm guessing average life expectancy must have been significantly lower in 1888, when Digory Kirke was born (according to Lewis's later timeline), but that doesn't tell us anything about how "well" a person ages. As far as we know, he seems to have lived at his country house for most of his teenage and adult life, with a lot of outdoor activity and fresh air and little pollution and probably healthy unprocessed food. I'm pretty sure we're told he smoked a pipe, and we don't know about his drinking habits, but I can't see many obvious factors that would have caused him to age prematurely.

I really do think it can only come down to Lewis not plotting out the timelines and other details of his stories very carefully. But in this case it shouldn't really matter for a future screen adaptation, as there's no real need for a film or series of MN to show the exact year in which it's set. So long as the setting looks "Late Victorian", most viewers probably won't stop to calculate the exact number of years between this story and the WW2 setting of LWW! {ym}:giggle:  

(And even the WW2 setting could be dispensed with, as we've discussed in at least one other thread; the Walden film and at least one stage version chose to make a big deal of the wartime setting, but Lewis himself skims over it and the late 1970s animated version leaves it out entirely. But that's now getting really off topic.)

Maybe in writing the creation story of Narnia and deciding to set it during the era of his own early childhood, he just didn't think to count the years between that period and the WW2 setting of LWW, so he didn't realise this wasn't really long enough to make Digory in MN as elderly as he should be to fit the description of the Professor in LWW

Maybe people aged differently in the early-mid twentieth century. They didn't have as many regulations about pollution and hazardous chemicals, and they smoked, drank, and lived generally unhealthy lifestyles. The free radicals and other health problems caused by that would probably be higher than today. Also, someone who is in their 50s could still have gray hair and other age-associated traits. In 1950, the life expectancy of the UK was only 69 so 50 would be pretty old back then.

@mel I actually haven't thought of the illustrations from A Little Princess. I know that Miss Minchin was a strict woman. Aunt Letty would obviously not approve of bare arms (given that scene where Jadis walks into their house and Aunt Letty sees her). Imagine seeing her reaction on screen.

I think "awful eyes" from Uncle Andrew would have been from where he was trying out his experiment. That is, when he was working on the rings. He may have started out decent, but after discovering what the box consisted of, his eyes may have changed. There is a moment where he tries to dress up to impress Jadis, and thinks of how she would fall in love with him.

@mel I don't have the book on hand right now to quote from, but Uncle Andrew is definitely described as having a shock of unkempt, fluffy white hair (it plays a role in the plot later on when the Talking Beasts debate which end of him to plant in the ground), and even before we meet him in the story, Digory describes him as having "such awful eyes". So regardless of what he wears, there are already visual clues that he's not a nice, respectable, "normal" Victorian gentleman.

Uncle Andrew will be interesting to see. They could make him quite respectable to look at (that would match his mindset in the book) OR they could start dropping some visual hints by giving him a colorful waistcoat or other unusual accessory...

As for Victorian London, as @mel pointed out, MN would be a lot closer to Finding Neverland and My Fair Lady than A Christmas Carol or Oliver Twist would be. It would be kind of close to the setting of A Little Princess and The Secret Garden. Both the main characters from each story were born in India, and they come to live in London. Digory mentions that his father is away in India, given that at the time, India belonged to Great Britain. CS Lewis obviously would have known about that.