The ladies could all wear hoop skirts and the men could all wear suits and top hats. The Victorian era probably has the most interesting clothing styles of any modern society. The books mention the young boys having to wear stiff collars I believe. 

@jasmine_tarkheena I'd avoid using anything from other countries.  England had different fashions and styles from Canada and America by this time. 

The more extreme fashions (bustles etc) were much less in use by then. And we also need to consider that the characters wouldn't be wearing fashionable clothes. Aunt Letty would be in conservative outfits.

The men might wear stovepipe hats like you see in movies based on Charles Dickens’ books. I always wondered why those hats were so popular at that time. They might look good on Victorian pictures and old fashioned Christmas cards, but they were probably very uncomfortable for the people wearing them. I can remember people wearing hats to church (both men and women), but that has gone out of style too. Comfort is much more important today, but people used to be more formal. 

It's no wonder that Aunt Letty did not approve of bare arms when she first encountered Jadis. So it would make sense that she would dress in a more conservative way.

I think MN was set way beyond Charles Dickens novels. A majority of his novels are set during the 1840's-1850's and according to the Timeline, MN is set in 1900.

Talking of the year in which MN is set, it'd make a little more sense for it to be at least a couple of decades earlier (which wouldn't make any major difference to the period costumes). I say that simply because Digory, according to the timeline, is 12 when the events of MN take place, but then as the Professor in LWW, he's described as a "very old man" with masses of white hair. When in fact, going by the timeline, he'd be only 52 in 1940!! (Which may seem "old" to young children, but it doesn't quite seem to fit the description in the book.)

Posted by: @jasmine_tarkheena

I think MN was set way beyond Charles Dickens novels. 

Correct; MN is much closer to My Fair Lady than A Christmas Carol. 1900 is late, late Victorian era and early Edwardian in terms of fashion. Finding Neverland has English children in approximately the same setting if that helps visualize the time period.

@courtenay Lewis's description of the Professor in LWW is endearing but awkward to reconcile with MN. I wonder if he was thinking of a bearded colleague, and trying to describe from a child's view.

@coracle I'm guessing it could just be another discrepancy between LWW and MN that Lewis may never have stopped to think about. He does actually give us a pretty clear dating for MN by mentioning Sherlock Holmes and the Bastables in the opening paragraph — most of the Sherlock Holmes stories were published in the 1890s and 1900s, and even more specifically, Edith Nesbit's The Story of the Treasure Seekers was first published in 1899. 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? We've discussed in a previous thread how, even when writing VDT — set only two years after LWW — he was already describing "the war years" as "long ago", even when the war in fact would still have been going on at that time... I can only conclude he just wasn't very good with dates when planning out his books!  

There must be something wrong with the Narnia Timeline. Then again, CS Lewis didn't plan out the series in advanced. There can be a whole discussion about the timeline, though.

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.

@jasmine_tarkheena I was thinking about how I'd imagine Aunt Letty, and realized I was picturing Mrs. Minchkin from Graham Rust's illustrations for A Little Princess--solid, darker colors, and lots of little buttons down the front of a high-necked bodice. 

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...

@jasmine_tarkheena There are LOTS of things "wrong" with the Narnia timeline — fans have been debating these for decades and we've discussed a number of them here in other threads. But then there are significant inconsistencies even between the books themselves. There's really no way to reconcile most of them other than to accept that Lewis didn't do very much careful planning while writing the series. It doesn't spoil my enjoyment of the books — they are as they are! — but some of the discrepancies are things that future film-makers may have grapple with somehow.

@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.

@courtenay Right. According to the timeline, Narnia lasted for 2555 years. Though as Narnia fans, we sure like to speculate what could have happened in between.

@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.

Posted by: @courtenay

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.

Posted by: @azog-the-defiler  

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!  

(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.)