Lewis and Cambridge

Abstract

Although he held the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge for the last nine years of his life and published three books with Cambridge University Press, C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) is almost always identified in the popular mind with Oxford. There are good reasons for this. First, Lewis was Oxford bred. He came up to University College as an undergraduate in 1917 and, except for his war service, he was at Oxford continually until the end of 1954. During that time he was successively an undergraduate (with Firsts in Mods, Greats, and English), a freelance tutor in philosophy, a Fellow of Magdalen and tutor in English, and a university lecturer in the English Faculty. Second, it was at Oxford that Lewis wrote the books that first brought him fame-as a literary scholar (The Allegory of Love [1936]), as a Christian apologist (The Screwtape Letters [1942] and Broadcast Talks [1942] 1), and as a writer of children's stories (The Chronicles of Narnia [1950-56]). Third, his autobiography, Surprised by Joy (1955), ends with him still in Oxford. Fourth, Lewis's circle, The Inklings, was exclusively an Oxford gathering. Finally and contrastively, the years Lewis spent at Cambridge were also the years of Shadowlands-his friendship with and marriage to Joy Davidman and his