Posted by: @col-klink

@courtenay I'm impressed you put that much thought into whether or not the wardrobe room could lead into another room. I thought it unlikely from the text, but I didn't really feel like rereading all the relevant descriptions to prove it one way or the other.  

Well, the thought intrigued me, as I'd never got that impression from the book myself, but others obviously had, and you mentioned that illustration — and I have the evening free and I love delving into those books, especially when a question comes up over what they actually do or don't say, so...

Seriously, as I said, I'd never given much thought as to why Mrs Macready was taking the tour group into the totally uninteresting wardrobe room, so I appreciate being part of a discussion on it! I love all the interesting things that come up on NarniaWeb and how people share their own takes on aspects of Narnia that some of us might not even have noticed.

I wonder if the room containing the wardrobe was like an attic. Probably tourists wouldn’t go into an attic so quickly since it is usually a private part of the home.  It would be a good place to hide to get away from large groups of people.  And that is what the four children wanted.  Some houses have attics without finished floors.  You had to watch your step or you might fall through the ceiling of the room underneath you.  That would be no place for a wardrobe.  I think Lewis had a fascination with attics since there were houses connected by them in The Magician’s Nephew.  Perhaps the “spare rooms” were somewhat magical.  🙂

Posted by: @narnian78

 I think Lewis had a fascination with attics since there were houses connected by them in The Magician’s Nephew.  

Attics were common in England at the time.  I think it is likely that older terraced houses had that connection via their attics, and I'm trying to think of what it was used for; perhaps for access to do roof maintenance, or something to do with chimney sweeping?
I have so far found evidence of one attic that ran the length of a full terrace! https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/homes-and-property/our-attic-runs-through-all-the-houses-on-our-terrace-can-we-secure-it-for-privacy-1.4195204

That's fascinating, @coracle! Definitely reminds one of The Magician's Nephew. Mind you, the Professor's house in LWW is of course out on its own in the country with no neighbouring houses, so while it almost certainly had attics, they wouldn't have been the same sort.

I suppose the wardrobe room could be an attic room, but we're not told that it is. Lewis gives quite a description of the kinds of rooms the children looked into while exploring the house during their first full day there. I won't quote it in full, but it's in the first chapter (p. 11 in my Puffin edition). We're told that after the room with the suit of armour and the room "all hung with green, with a harp in one corner" (that's got to be a nod to Lewis's Irish roots!), there were "three steps down and five steps up, and then a kind of little upstairs hall and a door that led out onto a balcony" — so they are definitely fairly high up in the house. But we don't get any more references to stairs, just to "a whole series of rooms that led into each other and were lined with books" — and "shortly after that" comes the wardrobe room.

Just the fact that Lewis takes the time to describe those little details like "three steps down and five steps up", but doesn't give any sense of them climbing up more and more stairs, as they'd have to in order to get to attic rooms, makes me think the wardrobe probably isn't in an attic. I think I've always assumed that that room is at the end of a corridor or else it's the last of the series of interconnected rooms and is a dead end, but we don't know exactly. It certainly seems to be a bit out of the way and an unexpected place for Mrs Macready to be taking her party of trippers to see.

Of course, all of this raises the question of why the Professor would hide the wardrobe away in such an obscure part of his house when it was made of the wood from such a special tree! But Lewis hadn't thought of any of that back-story when he wrote LWW. It does all give the whole story a lovely mysterious quality, that we don't really know what that room is for and why there's nothing in it but a wardrobe — and then Lucy feels led to stay behind and just have a look inside, which is the sort of thing I would have done as a child too. Even as an adult, since I now live in England myself and have visited a lot of old houses like the Professor's — "the sort... that you never seem to come to the end of, and... full of unexpected places" — I can quite easily imagine there might be a passage to another world hidden away somewhere in one of them...  

I'm going to stick with the room having two doors. Because, if they were in the room, and the handle was turning, and the wardrobe was closer than the other door, of course they'd in the wardrobe. Especially if the doors of the mansion were thick and heavy and the hinges not well-oiled. Plus, the housekeeper might have seen or heard the other door closing, or if it was left ajar, wonder why it was left ajar, and blame the kids (even though she doesn't seem like a bad sort.) The wardrobe door would be smaller and lighter and more easily shut.

Lewis does imply there was some irregularity about the tour guests coming up that way, so... I suppose someone had to use the loo, and she was leading them, and the closest route was through the wardrobe room? Or maybe the Professor was working on a project and they had to detour around his study so as not to disturb him.

Or, if you subscribe to the single-door theory, that room had a window that had a lovely view of the garden/moors/woods whatever, one of the guests wanted to see it, and that's why they came. Of course, not in the text, but we can speculate. And at the last minute the guest changed their mind, so they didn't go into the room. All conjecture of course.

As for the room being empty, I don't think of room fixtures like doors and windows being "in" the room, they are part of the room, like a fireplace would also be. Furniture, carpets, etc. are "in" the room.

As for why the Professor locked the wardrobe away instead of keeping it like a precious keepsake... he just probably thought the wood of the tree was ordinary wood, and the wardrobe therefore an ordinary wardrobe, one that he forgot about in day-to-day living.

Or, maybe he suspected its power and wanted to keep it out of the way. We don't know!