Beschreibung:

Autograph letter signed, 'C.S. Lewis', Magdalen College, Oxford, 22 May 1952, to 'Grittletonians' in response to their fan letters for the first two books of the Chronicles of Narnia, 'Like you, I am sorry that Peter and Susan are not going back to Narnia, but I think, being the two eldest, they are now getting to the age at which people stop having that sort of adventure for a time - they may start having it again later, but not for some years. The new book is called The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Lucy and Edmund find Caspian (now King of course) on board ship, sailing to the Eastern end of the Narnian world. There will be lots about Reepicheep. And there will be a Sea Serpent, and a Dragon, and lots of strange islands. I do hope you will all like it. I intend to have seven of these stories altogether - that is, four more after the next one. They will be called The Chronicles of Narnia. The sixth ['fifth' deleted and corrected] book will go right back to the beginning and explain how there came to be that magic wardrobe in the Professor's house - for of course you will have guessed that the old Professor must have known something about things like that himself, or else he would never have believed what the children told him. I don't know yet what will happen in the seventh. What do you think would be a good thing to end the whole series with? Of course Aslan will come into them all', the author then reflecting, 'I wonder what other books you all like. I like George MacDonald's two Curdy books and Tolkien's The Hobbit, and [Kenneth Grahame's] The Wind in the Willows. Do you write stories yourselves? I did at your age: it is the greatest fun', and adding two further works in the post script, 'E. Nesbitt's [sic] works are splendid, I think: especially The Phoenix and the Wishing Carpet and The Amulet', a little creased, 2 pages, oblong 8vo (14 x 21.5cm) The recipients of this warm and insightful letter about the plot lines and planning for the Narnia series would have been pupils at Grittleton House School, in the village of Grittleton, Wiltshire, an independent co-educational school which opened in 1951, (closed in 2016), and this letter must have been written in response to some of its first pupils. The school's rural country mansion character and setting would have borne some similarity to Lewis's description of the professor's mansion in the countryside where the young Pevensie children went to live, and where they discovered the wardrobe. Lewis, too, would have empathised with the children from Grittleton House School, not too far away in the adjoining county to Oxford where he was then living, for he spent some of his early childhood in a large house on the edge of Belfast, and then much of his youth in boarding schools. At the time Lewis wrote this letter he had already written the first five books, but clearly had not yet decided how the final book would end. The Magician's Nephew (the last to be written) was completed in February 1954 and published in May 1955. The Last Battle (the final work in the series) was completed in March 1953 and published in September 1956. In 1957 Lewis wrote to an American fan: 'I think I agree with your [chronological] order for reading the books more than with your mother's. The series was not planned beforehand as she thinks. When I wrote The Lion I did not know I was going to write any more. Then I wrote P. Caspian as a sequel and still didn't think there would be any more, and when I had done The Voyage I felt quite sure it would be the last, but I found I was wrong. So perhaps it does not matter very much in which order anyone read them. I'm not even sure that all the others were written in the same order in which they were published' (Lyle Dorsett & Marjorie Lamp Mead, editors, C.S. Lewis: Letters to Children, 1995). To find Lewis championing Wind in the Willows (1908) and the much later The Hobbit (1937) is unsurprising, but the two other authors mentioned were equally important and