I see it as both comical and tense in the book. Would it be harder to have it be both in the medium of film? (That's not a rhetorical question. I'm genuinely wondering.)

If the director has to choose, I'd say focus on the drama and tension. They're more inherent to the plot at that point. I mean, Digory has to risk getting trampled by a horse to save everyone from Jadis. Unless the whole movie is a comedy, it'd be weird for that not to be played for drama. Also, since Digory and Polly are responsible for inflicting Jadis on Narnia in this scene, we need her threat to feel palpable or they might lose sympathy. 

That being said, it would be a such a shame to lose the funny lines from this scene like Frank advising Jadis to go home and have a nice cup of tea or the crowd calling her the empress of Colney Hatch (though maybe they should change that to "looney bin" or something so it's more understandable to modern audiences.) 

I've always read the Jadis in London scene as deliberately played for laughs, and I enjoy it for what it is when reading the book. Lewis at this point is pretty much channelling Edith Nesbit, so to speak — she was one of his own favourite authors when he was a boy, and he would have read a lot of her books as or soon after they were first published, in the very late Victorian / early Edwardian era, which happens to be the same period The Magician's Nephew itself is set in. Hence the reference to the Bastables (The Treasure Seekers) at the start of the opening chapter!

And indeed, this entire scene with Jadis is almost certainly Lewis's homage to a specific episode in Nesbit's book The Story of the Amulet, in which the Queen of Babylon is brought from her own time into the (then) present day and causes a stir in Edwardian London. There's even an elderly gentleman with a great interest in antiquities, who meets her — initially in ancient Babylon itself — and is completely wowed, though he's a much nicer character than Uncle Andrew and not sinister at all! (I can't remember all the details, as it's years since I read that book, but if anyone's interested, it's the sequel to Five Children and It — the one with the wish-granting Psammead or Sand-fairy — and The Phoenix and the Carpet, all featuring the same group of siblings as the main characters.)

There's also a factor that I think needs to be borne in mind with this scene in MN, one of those we-know-something-the-main-character-doesn't things, which Lewis himself points out in the narrative: Digory is panicking over Jadis running loose in London, but he isn't aware that her magic powers don't work outside her own world (as we see in the scene where she unsuccessfully tries to "blast" Aunt Letty). She still has superhuman strength, but she can't actually cast spells, let alone use the Deplorable Word. So from the start, that defuses a lot of the tension for us as readers, knowing that Jadis can't cause nearly as much damage as Digory fears she can, and indeed as she herself would like to.

And that in itself is the source of a lot of the comedy — she is desperate to rule over this world as she once did over her own, and hopeful that Uncle Andrew might have some magic that enables her to do so, but she's severely limited in what she can actually do, and to her complete chagrin, she's reduced to a laughing-stock for the working-class Londoners who think she's a circus performer or an escapee from the lunatic asylum. Again, I'd say Lewis is doing all this deliberately to ease the tension of the earlier chapters and give young readers a chance to laugh at a totally evil character whose efforts to conquer the world are not going according to plan.

All of this creates a particular atmosphere in the book, and I would hope the film at least shows some respect towards that, even if it doesn't play up the comical elements quite as much as Lewis himself did. I can understand a screen-writer not wanting to lose too much of the drama at this point, but I also wouldn't want to see the humour in this story totally sacrificed. The Narnia books do have quite a lot of tense and bleak episodes, but they also have a lot of joy and laughter, and I'm hoping that Gerwig and any other future directors will sense that balance and get it just about right.

@courtenay Slightly off topic here but did Jadis lose ALL her magical powers in our world? I don't think Lewis implied that anywhere, just that she had lost the power of turning things (or people) into dust. 

@hermit I think she had no magic, just superior size and strength, in our world. 

@hermit I've just been looking through the relevant chapters, and Lewis leaves it fairly ambiguous — "If she had lost some magical powers in our world, she had not lost her strength; she could break an iron bar as if it were a stick of barley-sugar." You're right that he doesn't say she had lost all of her magical powers, but at the same time, he doesn't show her trying to perform any actual magic after her attempt to "blast" Aunt Letty fails.

We don't actually know what other powers she may have had in Charn, or whether any other types of magic she knew may have worked in our world, but as far as we see from the scenes in London, she only uses her superhuman strength and, to the extent she can, the general terrifyingness of her presence. She does still seem convinced that she can rule this world, but I think there's meant to be an implication that she is so totally obsessed with (and corrupted by) power that she isn't stopping to think just how she's going to achieve this without the ability to reduce people and things to dust. It could be that she has other magical powers that we don't know about — and that she hasn't tried out yet to see whether or not they work (perhaps she doesn't yet dare, in case it turns out she doesn't have any magic here at all and so she doesn't want anyone to see that?) — but Lewis just doesn't show us or tell us enough to be able to say for sure. So I don't think there's an absolutely definite answer to that question.

I think it'd be weird if she lost her power to turn things to dust but not her other magic powers. I mean, why would that one be different? (I don't see her strength as magic. I always assumed it was a genetic thing.) 

There is some humor in Jadis losing some of her abilities in our world.  I think there is more humor in Uncle Andrew thinking that she is someone who is great and she does not have such a high opinion of him. He is made to look quite ridiculous and he is humbled after being arrogant.   She sees him as being a lesser magician even though he thinks he is great. But I think both of them had to eat some humble pie. 🙂

I'm just thinking, too, that while Lewis definitely does write the Jadis-in-London episode as comedy, he's noticeably careful not to overdo it to the point where it ruins the overall tone of the story. I remember a while ago when NarniaWeb's Talking Beasts podcast did a chapter-by-chapter analysis of The Magician's Nephew, the presenters called this episode "How C.S. Lewis Avoided Jumping the Shark" — using the metaphor taken from the classic TV show Happy Days, to describe the point where the writer does something so absurd with the plot that from there on in, you just can't take the story seriously any more. (Here's the link to the podcast, with an absolutely brilliant mash-up illustration. )

I'd say the way Lewis manages to avoid taking it too far is that we don't actually see very much of what Jadis does in London first hand. After she leaves with Uncle Andrew, we just have Digory agonising over what she might do, and as he doesn't know her magic powers aren't working, he's terrified that "At the present moment... she might be blasting Buckingham Palace or the Houses of Parliament: and it was almost certain that quite a number of policemen had by now been reduced to little heaps of dust." We ourselves know this isn't happening, but we can completely empathise with Digory's fears at this moment. Then there's the interlude where he overhears Aunt Letty telling a visitor, who's brought grapes for Digory's mother, that "it would need fruit from the land of youth to help her now. Nothing in this world will do much." Which of course gives Digory that great surge of hope, knowing, as he does now, that there really ARE other worlds outside this one, and there really might be one where he could find fruit that would cure his mother...

I mention that because Lewis is here drawing our attention, along with Digory's, back to the deeper emotional side of this story, and to what the ability to enter other worlds might mean for this boy whose mother is dying. That re-centres it all, in a way, and makes sure we as readers don't get overwhelmed by either the awful side or the funny side of what Jadis might be doing in London. And then before too long we're brought back to that as Digory hears galloping and soon realises "Why, it's Her" — but now we're better set up for the mainly comical scene that follows, because we've been reminded of what the heart of this story is about.

And then when Jadis does reappear and all the action comes on thick and fast, we can only speculate what she might have done in London, rather than being shown it all blow by blow. About the most we're told is that she's robbed a jeweller's shop and given the proprietor a black eye — "Hundreds and thousands of pounds' worth she's taken out of my shop. Look at that rope of pearls round her neck. That's mine..." But we're left to imagine the details, and everything else she might have done, including how she commandeered Frank's hansom cab after it first arrived and where she took it from there. (Incidentally, having her stand on the roof of it is quite a clever stroke — a hansom is a two-wheeled cab, as Lewis would remember very well from his childhood when they were common, and Jadis is obviously assuming it's a kind of chariot and trying to drive it accordingly. I hate to think what she might have done if she'd arrived a little later in our world's history and discovered the motor car!!)

I'm sure I remember someone suggesting somewhere — either in the Talking Beasts podcast (I haven't re-listened to that episode since I first heard it a couple of years ago) or in another forum discussion here — that it'd be fun if a movie of MN could show us more of what Jadis did in London, like making Uncle Andrew take her for a meal in an expensive restaurant and all the havoc she might cause there. I agree that could be hilarious, but really, I think it'd be a distraction from the main thrust of the story, and it'd risk doing what Lewis, as I've been saying, avoids doing — playing up the comedy so far that it turns into farce and makes it a lot harder to take the story seriously as a whole.

As it is, I think he handles this entire episode really skilfully — he was a very experienced writer by this stage, and I personally believe MN is possibly the best written book in the entire series, for the complexity of the plot and the emotional heights and depths it reaches. Again, at this point, we're given just enough Jadis-as-comedy to relieve some of the tension and darkness of the previous chapters, but we're not allowed to forget the high stakes of this point in the plot: both the need to get her out of our world before she causes even more serious damage, and Digory's desire and increasing hope of finding, in one of those other worlds, a way of saving his mother's life.

And again, I just hope that the (presumably) upcoming film of this story, even if it doesn't handle this scene in exactly the same way the book does, will understand that balance and bring it out in a way that does justice to Lewis's superb writing!

I would hope, as @col-klink asked, that the Jadis in London scene would be comical as well as tense.  As has been mentioned by others here, yes, we as the readers of the book are aware that Jadis was not able to blast Aunt Letty - but that said, how much power and strength - did she have and what damage could she do.  The scene does demonstrate she was still capable of some damage with superhuman strength - including how she attacks the police officers.  It would appear that if she had more opportunity, she could still inflict quite a lot of damage.  Indeed, the scene does also have its comical element though, and after seeing how powerful she was in Charn, I think the comical side would provide some relief to audience also, before they go into Narnia and see the differences of how even that world affects her.

The other thing I think about that scene, is how easily that particular scene could be translated to film.  So many different characters to portray from different classes and backgrounds.  I look forward to hearing the cockney accents!  

@Courtenay: I'm just thinking, too, that while Lewis definitely does write the Jadis-in-London episode as comedy, he's noticeably careful not to overdo it to the point where it ruins the overall tone of the story

Quite so. The cockney accents of Jadis' working-class hecklers are quite deliberate in this case. The underlying contempt is for people who make themselves out as being better than they think they are, whether it is the Empress, Jadis claims to be, or Uncle Andrew, who, when he was getting himself ready to treat Jadis to a fancy restaurant meal, began to rather fancy himself, as well. 

"Ho! Hempress, are you? We'll see about that", said a voice. Then another voice said, "Three cheers for the Hempress of Colney 'Atch" and quite a number joined in. A flush of colour came into the Witch's face and she bowed ever so slightly. But the cheers died away into roars of laughter and she saw they had only been making fun of her.. (Ch 8, p.88 of my edition)

Jadis assumed that doing magic was a royal prerogative in all worlds, not just her own. But that is not the case at all, especially as London at the time had its very own Empress of India in Victoria, and I've no doubt that these jeering cockneys would have been a whole lot more respectful if Victoria, Queen of Great Britain, herself, had by chance passed by, whatever others in the past 125 years have said about her.

Just as Jadis said to Polly & Digory that Uncle Andrew was only a charlatan playing at magic, that description in this scene was also turned back on her. In London, Queen Victoria was the real deal, and it was Jadis who was the charlatan from Charn, overrating her own authority. "We are not amused" famously said the mother of King Edward VII, without ever needing a "deplorable word". But Jadis was only Queen of dust and decay, and not one of actual living beings. 

There now, I've been itching to say that for years. By the way, where was Colney Hatch, exactly, anyway? 

Posted by: @waggawerewolf27

There now, I've been itching to say that for years. By the way, where was Colney Hatch, exactly, anyway?

It's in London, in the northern suburbs, and at the time of Lewis's childhood (the era in which MN is set), it was the sight of a well-known insane asylum. Hence, the heckler calling Jadis the Hempress of Colney 'Atch is implying she's escaped from what we now call the loony bin.   (Colney is pronounced "Coney", by the way, in the logical manner of so many British place names.) 

Posted by: @courtenay

Posted by: @waggawerewolf27

There now, I've been itching to say that for years. By the way, where was Colney Hatch, exactly, anyway?

It's in London, in the northern suburbs, and at the time of Lewis's childhood (the era in which MN is set), it was the sight of a well-known insane asylum. Hence, the heckler calling Jadis the Hempress of Colney 'Atch is implying she's escaped from what we now call the loony bin.   (Colney is pronounced "Coney", by the way, in the logical manner of so many British place names.) 

Thank you for confirming for me that "Colney Hatch" was a very real place, and what it was for. Without that sort of information, I wouldn't have really "got" the joke, let alone the very sober reality behind what C.S.Lewis was actually saying, and how well it chimes in with the warning Aslan gives to Polly and Digory before he sends them back to London at the end of the story.

Even as a 10- or 11-year-old in Sydney, New South Wales, when I first read this book, I did understand all too well the ubiquitous Cockney dropping of aitches at 'Aberfield' and picking them up again at 'Hashfield'. Both suburbs, by the way, were close to the now long abandoned institution of Callan Park, Sydney's equivalent of Colney Hatch. The rationale of having such establishments was that in Victorian times, people behaving irrationally had to be locked away for community safety, when such people, if not restrained, could do quite enough damage to threaten life and property. As did Jadis, let loose in London, quite promptly. Once she saw they were making fun of her, that is when she tore off one of the bars on the lamppost, to whit, public property, even if she, like me, didn't actually know where "Colney Hatch" was, or what it was for.

I took it that "Colney Hatch" was something like the British equivalent of "Woop Woop", a vaguely fictitious place which is generally somewhere "in the sticks", out "Back o' Bourke", a NSW town named after the NSW Governor, who in 1835 gave us "Terra Nullius", to override John Batman's treaty with the Wundunjeri, that he made to establish his "Batmania", which in 1837 was called Melbourne after Queen Victoria's favourite Prime Minister, it was said. I even thought that Colney Hatch could have been Colony Hatch, to tell the truth.  

One of the frustrations I have found about reading even children's books like The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett or Susan Coolidge's What Katy Did, was the absolute lack of mention of Australia anywhere in American literature, especially. It is not only in a factual global historical analysis of colonialism, like Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads, that Australia largely misses out, but also in Diana Gabaldon's encyclopaedic Outlander series when, despite examining minutely British & USA history at the time of the American Revolution & what part emigré Scots & French aid, played in it, she doesn't mention even so much as a newspaper obituary, as far as I can see, of Captain Cook, what he accomplished, or his death in Hawaii, in 1779, long before Sydney was established. I was an adult before I realised that The Antipodes was another name for both Australia and New Zealand, which thanks to the 6th February, 1840 Waitangi Treaty was separated from the area of New Holland of what was in 1770 called New South Wales. 

Posted by: @waggawerewolf27

Even as a 10- or 11-year-old in Sydney, New South Wales, when I first read this book, I did understand all too well the ubiquitous Cockney dropping of aitches at 'Aberfield' and picking them up again at 'Hashfield'.

I'm more inclined to think of a certain Eliza Doolittle: "In 'Ertford, 'Ereford and 'Ampshire, 'urricanes 'ardly hever 'appen."  

Both suburbs, by the way, were close to the now long abandoned institution of Callan Park, Sydney's equivalent of Colney Hatch. The rationale of having such establishments was that in Victorian times, people behaving irrationally had to be locked away for community safety, when such people, if not restrained, could do quite enough damage to threaten life and property.

By the late Victorian era (the setting of MN), at least some of those institutions were a lot more enlightened than in the past, seeking to ease, if not cure, their inmates' mental distress and to treat them humanely rather than just locking them away. Off the topic, but very interesting on that score, is Simon Winchester's book The Surgeon of Crowthorne, exploring the true story of one such mental patient, at Broadmoor asylum in Berkshire, who became a prolific contributor to the Oxford English Dictionary as it was being compiled. (WARNING: it contains a few graphic and sometimes gruesome details that not everybody would be comfortable reading about, but if you're interested in history and have a strong stomach, highly recommended.) 

However, I don't know if Colney Hatch was among those more humane establishments in the early 1900s, so I've no idea how Jadis might have been treated if she did get sent there! 

One of the frustrations I have found about reading even children's books like The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett or Susan Coolidge's What Katy Did, was the absolute lack of mention of Australia anywhere in American literature, especially. It is not only in a factual global historical analysis of colonialism, like Peter Frankopan's The Silk Roads, that Australia largely misses out, but also in Diana Gabaldon's encyclopaedic Outlander series when, despite examining minutely British & USA history at the time of the American Revolution & what part emigré Scots & French aid, played in it, she doesn't mention even so much as a newspaper obituary, as far as I can see, of Captain Cook, what he accomplished, or his death in Hawaii, in 1779, long before Sydney was established. I was an adult before I realised that The Antipodes was another name for both Australia and New Zealand, which thanks to the 6th February, 1840 Waitangi Treaty was separated from the area of New Holland of what was in 1770 called New South Wales. 

Well, the US didn't have many direct official dealings with Australia until well into the 20th century, so perhaps we can forgive them for leaving us out of their classic literature.   Britain of course had a lot more contact historically with Australia and New Zealand, so there's far less excuse there. But we do get a mention occasionally. I've just recently re-read Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons (first published in 1930), which I'd only read once as a child — it's set in the English Lake District —and I soon hit on a detail that I'd forgotten, even though it gets mentioned several times: the Walker children's mother is Australian, and there are references to her camping in the bush and learning to sail on Sydney Harbour! (As another point of historical interest, Ransome based that family on a real-life Armenian family he knew, who had settled in England, but perhaps he felt that was too exotic a background for audiences of the time — or, I think more likely, he didn't want to make the real people easily identifiable from this fictional version of them.) 

Or another example that impressed me a lot, when I first encountered it a few years ago, was the short story "Her Majesty's Servants", from The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling, first published in 1894. It's not one of the famous Mowgli stories, but instead relates the conversation among a group of working animals in the British army in India one night. One of them is a troop-horse who was born and bred in Australia — I raised an eyebrow on first reading that, eager to see if old Kipling actually knew anything accurate about my native land. It turns out this horse swears "By the Blue Gums of the Back Blocks" (not something anyone I know would actually say, but those are genuine Aussie terms), reacts badly to a mule calling him "you big brown Brumby!" — which Kipling glosses, correctly, as meaning "wild horse without any breeding" — and retorts that he's "related on [his] mother's side to Carbine, winner of the Melbourne Cup". I pretty much cheered at that point, reckoning Kipling must have actually been to Australia, and specifically to Melbourne, to know details like that back in the 1890s — and yes, it turns out he had.   (Carbine, winner of the Cup in 1890, was widely considered the greatest champion racehorse in Australian history, until Phar Lap, his direct descendant, took over that distinction in the early 1930s.)

And now, as I'm not sure how to get this back onto the topic of Jadis in London, and we're likely to have a moderator come down like a ton of bricks if I don't stop blathering about so many things that bear no relation to Narnia, I'll shut up here.  

@Courtenay: And now, as I'm not sure how to get this back onto the topic of Jadis in London, and we're likely to have a moderator come down like a ton of bricks if I don't stop blathering about so many things that bear no relation to Narnia, I'll shut up here.

Quite so. We'd be told to discuss such matters in the Ditto Town Hall, but I'm not quite sure how we would do that, either, when it could be a whole topic of discussion within English Literature, all on its own. I should have added that right up until WW1 Great Britain, Australia was still called The Colonies, despite our 1901 Federation, and Australians the Colonials, so my mistake about Colney Hatch, not being Colony Hatch might be more forgivable. Especially when people like Jadis who stole jewellery, hijacked a hansom cab and refused to pay the bill, could have been sentenced to hang, or ended up being transported to Botany Bay, another name for New South Wales, right up until 22nd May, 1840, or worse, still, to Van Diemen's Land, to where transportation didn't finish until 1853.  

Posted by: @pete

I would hope, as @col-klink asked, that the Jadis in London scene would be comical as well as tense.  As has been mentioned by others here, yes, we as the readers of the book are aware that Jadis was not able to blast Aunt Letty - but that said, how much power and strength - did she have and what damage could she do.  The scene does demonstrate she was still capable of some damage with superhuman strength - including how she attacks the police officers.  It would appear that if she had more opportunity, she could still inflict quite a lot of damage.  Indeed, the scene does also have its comical element though, and after seeing how powerful she was in Charn, I think the comical side would provide some relief to audience also, before they go into Narnia and see the differences of how even that world affects her.

 

The other thing I think about that scene, is how easily that particular scene could be translated to film.  So many different characters to portray from different classes and backgrounds.  I look forward to hearing the cockney accents!  

I couldn't agree more, especially when in one of the radio productions, I think it was, Aunt Letty, primmer and more conventional than her brother, was left saying quaveringly, that Jadis was "a dangerous woman, yes a very dangerous woman".  Pauline Baynes' illustrations portray Jadis in the Ketterley Household as rather vampish, with "bare arms", which in Victorian England would also brand the Witch as a "brazen huzzy", but that term is now somewhat outdated. I'm still looking for the exact references in the book, but Uncle Andrew seems to have fallen for her. Later he would call her "A dem fine woman", another rather idiomatic way of talking for so-called middle-class people at the time. A rather silly way of talking about her, too. 

However, now that we have seen Jadis in Queen Victoria's London, for the rest of the film it would be mainly the originally creepy Uncle Andrew, who would become the more comical character, especially his change of attitude to Jadis, herself. And I bet the filmmakers could make more fun of him than of Jadis, herself.  

Whoever plays Jadis is really going to have her work cut out, especially when Jadis, even before reaching London, is quite a different person whilst in the Wood between the Worlds.