Posted by: @col-klink

The Magician's Nephew are implied to take place after the war. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

I think you meant before the war.  Like, before World War I. 

The Bastables and Sherlock Holmes were definitely pre-war. Personally, I'd place the events of MN around 1900 or 1905, give or take a few years.  Of course, it was written post-war, so that might affect the flavour. (Mind you, so was LWW, now that I come to think of it )

ETA: Yes, I see what you mean @col-klink; a careful read of your sentence does make sense.

No, and I think it's due to Lewis's skill as a writer that the reader never does!

Posted by: @col-klink

Posted by: @col-klink

The Magician's Nephew are implied to take place after the war. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

I think you meant before the war.  Like, before World War I

Just reread the entire sentence. It'll make sense.

Posted by: @col-klink

I hardly think about World War II at all when I read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and I think about it even less when I read the other books which except for The Horse and his Boy (which doesn't have any scenes in our world) and The Magician's Nephew are implied to take place after the war. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

@col-klink I was just about to make the same comment as @aileth... I see what you mean now that I've re-read the sentence! Thanks for clarifying. It could do with a couple more commas, that's all:

... when I read the other books, which, except for The Horse and His Boy... and The Magician's Nephew, are implied to take place after the war.

Actually, the books immediately following LWW do also take place during WW2 according to Lewis's  timeline of Narnia (which wasn't published during his lifetime and I think he devised it some time after all the Chronicles had been published). LWW is set in 1940, PC in 1941, VDT in 1942 and SC later the same year. The only one of the books that's set post-WW2 is The Last Battle (1949)!

I somehow get the feeling that Lewis himself (writing these books in the 1950s) had practically forgotten the wartime setting of the first book by the time he wrote the others. There is no further allusion to the war at all, even while chronologically it would still be going on, throughout the rest of the series. No mention of rationing, travel restrictions, nightly blackout regulations, the bombings, fears for family members who are serving, or anything else that was very much part of daily life for everyone living in Britain during that time.

In fact, at the start of VDT, we're told that the Pevensies' parents are in America and they've taken Susan with them. I don't have the book with me (can someone please check it? I won't be home till Monday ), but I think their father is there on business — teaching or lecturing, maybe? I can't quite remember. Anyway, if this really is set in 1942... I don't think overseas travel was absolutely banned, but it would have been heavily restricted (especially with all the fuel that was needed for the armed forces and not to be wasted on non-essential travel) and potentially dangerous, certainly not something one did lightly. The war was still very much on in force and the US had joined it by that time too. For the children's parents to make an overseas trip for non-essential purposes at that time, AND to take their teenage daughter with them... historically speaking, it doesn't seem at all likely!  

To expand upon my general viewpoint expressed below...

Posted by: @icarus

I would argue that the WW2 setting isn't necessarily all that important to the story as a whole. LWW isn't an allegory for WW2, it was just a thing that happened shortly prior to Lewis writing the books which served as a convenient plot mechanic to have four children separated from their parents, without having to resort to the Orphan Cliché, which is pretty much the premise for every children's story ever written.

As Courtenay mentioned, the one and only time that World War 2 is ever mentioned in the entire Chronicles of Narnia is in the second sentence of the very first page in LWW.

"This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids"

You can just as easily replace the sentence with the following and it wouldn't change a single aspect of the story - thematically, narratively or otherwise.

"This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the pandemic because of social distancing".

Its a plot mechanic and nothing else. It barely even counts as context in my opinion. To illustrate this, here is a list of some reasons why World War 2 is not a relevant aspect of LWW as a story:

1. There is no war in Narnia - If the children entered Narnia and were immediately dropped into the middle of a War Zone, then i might agree that their experience in Narnia was intended to be an allegory which reflected the harsh realities of World War 2 going on in the real world. However, this is not the case. Sure, there is a single (barely described) battle at the end of the book, but one battle doesn't make a war. If anything the political situation in Narnia feels more akin to East Berlin under the grip of the Stasi during the Cold War, though since LWW was published a full 11 years before the Berlin Wall even went up, the poetic metaphor of a 100 Year Winter as an allegory for the Cold War is just happy coincidence.

    

2. The White Witch is not a Fascist - even if we take the most basic concept of Fascism as being a political ideology that seeks to unite nationalist sentiment through incitement of hatred towards an external group, the White Witch doesn't fit this description. At no point does she do or say anything that express any political ideologies that would be considered as Fascist. Its perhaps a label you could throw at Shift the Ape in 'The Last Battle' given the way he whips the Narnians up into a frenzy (its been a long time since i've read that book, so correct me if i'm wrong) by demonising some groups and enforcing militant worship of Puzzle, but it doesn't apply to the White Witch in my opinion.

    

3. None of the Children ever mention the war - I think Courtenay already covered this point, but throughout the story, the War is never brought up by any of the children. They never relate any of the obstacles or challenges they face in Narnia to the war, and they never express concern about the safety of their Mother and Father in the real-world who are presumably both at risk from Nazi attack. Therefore, since its not thematically relevant to the characters within the story, its hard for me as a reader to consider it thematically relevant to the book as a whole.

Whilst I would still prefer that adaptations of the books retain the war time setting, i wouldn't consider it essential. The story is very much told in a classical style, and as long as they retain that classical style, they could probably set the story in any time period they like. I guess that some people have a fear that modernising the setting means modernising the dialogue, and that all the characters would suddenly start spouting ridiculous modern cliches pertinent to whatever Hollywood thinks the "youth of today" sound like in any given era, but the reality is that classical style is timeless, and its not like the Pevensies ever really talked like they were from 1940s London anyway.

The main problem I have though with over-emphasising the WW2 setting is that it has the potential to muddy the waters as to what the book is really about - the children don't do what they do because they are trying to live up to the heroic deeds and sacrifices of those who fought in WW2, they aren't trying to emulate their father and make him proud, they aren't trying to restore democracy to Narnia (if anything they kind of do the exact opposite!). Its honestly just not a relevant thematic component of the story, and I likely don't have to tell anyone around here that the story is about something else entirely.

Posted by: @icarus

The White Witch is not a Fascist - even if we take the most basic concept of Fascism as being a political ideology that seeks to unite nationalist sentiment through incitement of hatred towards an external group, the White Witch doesn't fit this description.

You could argue that the Telmarines are supposed to be fascists by that definition.

Posted by: @icarus

I guess that some people have a fear that modernising the setting means modernising the dialogue, and that all the characters would suddenly start spouting ridiculous modern cliches pertinent to whatever Hollywood thinks the "youth of today" sound like in any given era

They actually might do that even if they don't update the setting. From what I understand it's the route Catherine Called Birdy, Bridgerton and the most recent Persuasion adaptation take.

Interesting topic!

When I first took LWW out of the school library, I got through 2 or 3 chapters before I decided it was a kids' book and I was too old for it. I was possibly 13, but I'd begun reading 'teenage' stuff and semi-adult stuff. I was bored, didn't finish it, and returned it to the library. It was then nearly 20 years since it had been published.

To me it was just another 1950s/1960s English kids' adventure story like the ones I'd been reading all my life (there are lots of excellent books from that period, some of which I first met as radio serials before we had TV).

I don't remember that they were evacuated to the countryside. I don't remember that it was during the war. I remember something about going to a different world, perhaps up to Edmund's visit.
[About five years later, when reintroduced to the books, I don't remember the war reference being any more than a date marking when it was set.]

Back then, the war and its aftermath were still in the background of our lives. My parents had emigrated from England five years after the war ended, and had told us something of their experiences in it (eg walking to school the morning after a raid, and seeing bombed houses). They were 13 and 14 when it began (only slightly older than Susan and Peter) and were not evacuated from their city in the north of England. We even had a photo of Dad in army uniform when he turned 18. 
The war was a fact, it had happened far away, but it was something we referred to and forgot.

I think the original readers were closer in time and place to the background of LWW. They only needed a sentence to conjure up sounds and images of the war, from newsreels and their own experience of bombs, rationing and evacuations. Lewis didn't need to elaborate; he didn't want to disturb his young readers!
If he were to write it today, setting it in that period, he would have to explain a lot more.  And I agree that a different scenario would be appropriate for the children being away from home.

A number of my collected children's books from early-mid century involve a holiday away from home, when parents were away or sick. Children had to be enterprising, trust unknown adults, and make decisions unexpectedly.
Perhaps the essential feature of the story's background is that the Pevensie children are away from home, but together, in a safe place in the countryside, where they begin to interact in ways that sort out some problems in their relationships.
And so into Narnia!

p.s.   I know that the curriculum in UK education requires children to have read or experienced at least one story set in a different time from their own. Hence I have seen several 'wartime' plays at children's theatres in London, and a number of productions of LWW (from the RSC one adapted by Adrian Mitchell) made a big thing of the evacuations.  [Mitchell thought it was useful to add the digging of an air-raid shelter in the garden, but they were supposed to be safe!]  LWW will probably continue to be seen in its context, no matter how short the reference.

I don't think WWII would have occurred to me since the war was only mentioned once in LWW. Could it have been that CS Lewis wasn't fond of war, but wasn't a pacifist either? He obviously understood the horrors of war, having been wounded while serving in WWI.

As for The Magician's Nephew, I actually agree with @@aileth and @courtenay on this. It is mentioned in the first chapter that Sherlock Holmes was still living on Baker Street. And I think it was the last year of Queen Victoria's reign (according to the timeline).

So do I think WWII when reading LWW? Well, not really. I've first read the series as a ten year old, and I have started studying US History as well. War is not really a pleasant kids topic, so CS Lewis may have thought it was best to avoid the subject.

I was wrong!!!  

All these years I've been asserting that the only reference Lewis makes to World War 2 throughout the whole series is that second sentence of LWW — "This story is about something that happened to them [the four children] when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids"... I just recently went back to VDT to see exactly what it says at the start about why the four Pevensies, in this case, have been separated and gone to three different places. And here's what we're told on the second page of the first chapter (emphasis added):

Peter was working very hard for an exam and he was to spend the holidays being coached by old Professor Kirke in whose house the four children had had wonderful adventures long ago in the war years.

I had honestly clean forgotten that one line, and it's doing my head in — because it seriously throws out not only the timeline of Narnia that Lewis put together after he'd finished writing the books (there are several significant discrepancies between that timeline and things we're told in the books themselves), but the internal chronology of even the three books he had written up to this point.

As I quoted just now, we're explicitly told that the reason the four children are at the Professor's house in the first book is that "they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids." That gives us a very specific time-frame for LWW. The main rounds of evacuation of British children happened in 1940, after Germany invaded France in May-June and after the actual bombing campaign, known as the Blitz, began in September (it lasted till May 1941). Lewis's timeline does tell us that the events of LWW happened in 1940 in our world, so that lines up exactly. So far, so good.

Lucy tells Mr Tumnus "It is summer there" where she comes from, so that certainly puts us in the middle of the year; as there's no mention of the children attending school or being given schoolwork while they're at the Professor's house, we can assume they went before September, when the British school year starts. (So technically they must have gone just before the air-raids began, but as it was fear of impending bombings that motivated the evacuations in the first place, that's splitting hairs a bit.)

But now in VDT we're being told that the "wonderful adventures" of LWW happened "long ago in the war years" — well, for children, even a few years can seem like "long ago", but this very clearly implies the war is now over. As I mentioned before, we're told at the same time that Susan has gone with her parents to America, and I can now quote exactly what Lewis says: "Father had got a job lecturing in America for sixteen weeks that summer, and Mother was to go with him because she hadn't had a real holiday for ten years."

As I said before, it is highly, highly unlikely that any teacher or professor from Britain would have been offered "a job lecturing in America for sixteen weeks" right in the midst of WW2, especially after the US had joined the war in December 1941. WW2 here in Britain affected every aspect of everyone's lives, to the point where even now, you can just say "the war" in this country and everyone knows which one you mean. Travel even within the country was restricted by fuel rationing; overseas travel would have been even more expensive and potentially dangerous. So we can assume that in Lewis's mind as he's writing VDT, "the war years" are definitely over.

But the problem with this is that the internal chronology of the books is also very explicit (especially because it's being compared each time with the fact that time in Narnia passes differently). The events of PC happen a year after the events of LWW — the children are going back to school in that second book, so it must be early September 1941 — and the events of VDT happen a year later, which means summer 1942. The war didn't end until three years later!!!  

Looking up the historical background, I did find out that there was another wave of evacuations from London in June 1944 during Germany's revenge bombing campaign that used flying bombs ("doodlebugs"). If the Pevensies had stayed in London till that point and gone to the Professor's house in summer 1944, that would put the events of VDT in summer 1946, a year after the war ended. That makes more sense, but Lewis was clearly thinking of the more widespread 1940 evacuations when he wrote LWW, since that's the year he put in his timeline afterwards.

So there it is... proof positive that the author himself, even within the space of the first three books he wrote, wasn't paying attention to whether the internal timeline of his story lined up with the real-life events he was referencing. And those events, at the time he was writing, were only 10 years earlier, so I'm amazed I've never seen critics pick up on this point before. Young first-time readers of the books in the 1950s may not have bothered to do the maths, but some older readers surely would have...

(All of which just goes to show yet again that, when it comes to world-building, Lewis was definitely NOT Tolkien. )

Wow you are right! The American lecture tour angle had been mentioned before, and the unlikelihood of travel. By that mention, too, Lucy and Edmund are much older in VoTDT, even though Lucy still seems the same age.

I always assumed the children left late in the war because of the doodlebug raids, which were truly random and horrifying because there was no way to predict when and where they would fall.

However, I always took "wonderful adventures long ago in the war years" to mean Lewis, as the narrator of the story, was telling it to children in the present - when the story was written in the early 1950s - and perhaps those of the future as well. The future readers would certainly the war as long ago because they either didn't remember it or were born after the war was over.

As a child in the early 1970s, I remember rummaging through an attic crawlspace in the house of my friend, where all sorts of remnants from the past were stored, and being flabbergasted by one of those net petticoats girls in the 1950s wore to puff out their skirts. It was literally like a relic from centuries ago.

Although I quote it shamelessly, the timeline was not referred to before Walter Hooper apparently found it, and published it in Past Watchful Dragons. 

I'd like to challenge any reader of Lewis's collected Letters or other publications, to produce information from them about the ages and dates in the Chronicles. 

Lewis was not a historian. Discussions online for over 20 years have agreed that the timeline has problems and does not always agree with the books' information. 

If it was genuinely drawn up by Lewis, and not merely assembled by Hooper based on Q&A with a very sick man, we have to accept that it is faulty.

We also have to accept that when he was writing VDT in the early 1950s Lewis forgot that it had been unsafe to travel to America ten years earlier. We may have to accept that he was thinking of post-war years when he wrote that introduction about the war being long ago.

I'm a bit surprised that the publishers never queried it!

Posted by: @coracle

Lewis was not a historian. Discussions online for over 20 years have agreed that the timeline has problems and does not always agree with the books' information. 

If it was genuinely drawn up by Lewis, and not merely assembled by Hooper based on Q&A with a very sick man, we have to accept that it is faulty.

Yes, exactly. I've got Past Watchful Dragons on hand and Hooper is obscure about where the timeline came from; he just comments that Lewis "had not worked out anything like a 'scheme' of Narnia/Earth equivalents beforehand [i.e. before writing all the books]. Having written the books, he then found out what they were by compiling the table given below..." — and the timeline follows with no further remarks on its origin. As you say, we don't know when it was put together and it's possible that Hooper helped to compile it while he was living with Lewis during the last few months of Lewis's life.

Where the timeline differs from the information given in the books, I generally take the books as canon (so Queen Swanwhite lived before the reign of the Pevensies, as we are told in The Last Battle, and her placement after them in the timeline is a mistake; Archenland was founded by the second son of Frank I and Helen, not the younger son of Frank V, and so on). But most of those discrepancies don't have a bearing on the main plots of the books themselves.

Posted by: @coracle

We also have to accept that when he was writing VDT in the early 1950s Lewis forgot that it had been unsafe to travel to America ten years earlier. We may have to accept that he was thinking of post-war years when he wrote that introduction about the war being long ago.

I'm a bit surprised that the publishers never queried it!

I'm surprised about that too, and surprised hardly anyone seems to have noticed it, because it's a major discrepancy in the books themselves, rather than between the books and the later timeline! Again, it doesn't really affect the plot and it certainly doesn't ruin the Chronicles for me (nothing ever could!). But I think it does prove that even as he was writing the books, Lewis wasn't thinking of WW2 as having a huge bearing on the lives of his fictional characters and shaping the stories in any significant way.

The placement of VoDT in the timeline makes sense if the kids were evacuated in 1944 over the doodlebug bombings. Though that raises the question of why they weren't sent out of the city earlier. If I could fill that part of the story in, I'd say they were away in boarding school during the first raids, but then the school closed down and they went back to their family in London, and had to be evacuated a second time when the doodlebugs began falling. After the war the school re-opened and they were sent back there.

@cobalt-jade Yes, that would make much more sense in relation to the events of VDT, which are clearly set after the war, but are also only two years after the events of LWW. But I've no idea if Lewis was originally thinking of LWW as set during the later wave of evacuations in 1944, and then forgot that detail when he wrote the timeline years later (or possibly dictated it to Walter Hooper).

Now I think about it, of course Lewis fostered several young evacuees at his own home near Oxford during the war. I forget whether that happened during the earlier evacuations (1939-1940) or the later ones (1944), though... does anyone here know? If he actually took in evacuees himself in 1944, that might explain him thinking of the war being over a couple of years later for his fictional evacuees in the Narnia books.

However, I've always had the impression that Lewis never did much detailed "behind the scenes" planning for the Narnia books, but just wrote what came to him at the time, sometimes (perhaps often) without checking back on what he wrote in the previous books to make sure all the details matched up. That would explain why there are so many little discrepancies even between the earlier books in the series, let alone between the earlier books and the later ones. So again, it wouldn't surprise me if, even in the two years between him writing LWW and writing VDT, he simply didn't stop to think that unless the events of LWW happened quite late in the war, the references in VDT to "long ago in the war years", and to the children's parents going on a working holiday in America, just wouldn't make sense.