inviting readers not to neglect these books any longer.
—Dr. David C. Downing
Co-Director, Marion E. Wade Center
Wheaton, Illinois
Introduction Why Neglected?
Calling C. S. Lewis a neglected author would appear to be a contradiction, given the popularity of his works and their high level of awareness among Christians and non-Christians alike. One could argue that he is, in fact, more popular now than he was during his lifetime. His mainstream theological and apologetic works continue to be in high demand and The Chronicles of Narnia have joined the canon of classic children’s literature, not to mention the feature films of recent years that have made these works and Lewis a household name. There are more scholars writing about Lewis, more societies and groups springing up around Lewis’s ideas, and more books being published about him and his work, than ever before. So how do we justify this seemingly incongruous designation of “neglected”?
Within Lewis’s corpus of published work are fifteen books of literary criticism (depending on how you count them) that most people don’t know about or haven’t read. Even people who claim to know Lewis well are often not acquainted with them. This book examines eight of Lewis’s works of literary criticism. They deal with authors and literary periods that most people don’t read anymore, and they are drawn primarily from Lewis’s works in literary criticism, the area of his focused academic and professional work. Lewis was a fellow at Oxford University and later the Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature at Cambridge University, and many of his literary loves and preoccupations are detailed in the pages of these books. So it is to these works that we apply the appellation of “neglected.”
One reason for their neglect, then, is that readers of Lewis simply don’t know they exist. Most mainstream attention focuses on the highly recognizable Lewis works such as his fiction and apologetics. While some of these more obscure works continue to be printed and available, others have slipped out of print and are only obtainable in rare editions or on superannuated library shelves where they sit and gather dust. They have suffered from a lack of promotion; that is, they have not been placed prominently before the reader of Lewis. Online searches of popular Lewis topics don’t often yield mentions of these works, and scholars, writers, and lecturers often don’t refer to them.
Another reason for this neglect is the difficulty of these works for mainstream audiences who don’t possess the specialized knowledge that Lewis presupposes in his writing. Many of these books began as lectures to students or groups who already understood the context of the literature. This made such lectures intelligible. It was entirely feasible for Lewis to assume that his auditors had read the works and authors on which he was discoursing or at least had a familiarity with them or the literary periods to which they belonged. For most of us now, this familiarity is entirely lacking, and this makes the reading of these books arduous and confusing. But if we are willing to learn and read slowly and do some research along the way, they will open their secrets to us.
Fascinatingly, Lewis himself wrote about neglected authors and literary periods. He engaged in what he termed rehabilitation, defending and/or reconceptualizing a period, genre, or author for which appreciation or critical understanding had been lacking. Thus, it is our goal to do for Lewis what he did for many authors and genres: dusting off his neglected books to bring them back into the arena of attention they deserve.
A lack of interest in the content of these works might be another reason why they are neglected. Because they primarily describe specific literary historical periods and their associated works of literature, it’s less an issue of them not being comprehensible as it is of them not being valued as worthy of study. In an age where the liberal arts are dwindling across college campuses in favor of more technical majors that presuppose to equip people better for the modern workplace, the kind of historical study Lewis advocates is not as appreciated as it once was. Our culture esteems actionable information over the kind of knowledge to be gained from reading the literature of another age. It’s a challenge, in an age where everything changes constantly and the pace of life seems ever-increasing, to think that old works of literature can matter in any substantial way. We tend to overvalue whatever is new and conflate this with progress. These are more difficult obstacles to overcome for the would-be reader of Lewis’s neglected works.
Benefits of Reading the Neglected Works
There are a number of benefits to the reader for undergoing the rigor these works demand. First of all, you’ll gain a greater understanding of C. S. Lewis as a person. We believe that you can’t claim to know him if you don’t know these neglected works. Part of understanding any author is to understand his body of work, his preoccupations, the books he read, and so forth. Many of the works Lewis writes about were vitally important not only to his profession, but to his spiritual growth. Reading literature was a way of life.
A second benefit is that these books will lead you to other authors of which you were perhaps unaware. Lewis opens doors for us and bids us enter. If we let them, these works and the books and authors to which they lead will constitute an education in itself. For example, when one first picks up A Preface to Paradise Lost, one realizes that the book won’t make sense unless Milton’s poem is read in conjunction with it. Lewis opens this door for readers to become acquainted with Milton and one of the greatest epic poems in the English language. Similarly, his essays on Sir Walter Scott or Jane Austen can help illuminate something of Scott’s or Austen’s preoccupations and inform the reading of those authors’ novels.
A third benefit is that these neglected works contain the development of many of Lewis’s most important ideas. These ideas can frequently be found in his mainstream books, including his fiction. But they were often first formulated in his literary criticism. For example, we believe that you can’t really know The Chronicles of Narnia or the Ransom trilogy if you haven’t read The Discarded Image, Lewis’s opus on the medieval cosmology and worldview. Doing so will enrich and deepen your understanding of those books. Similarly, reading Studies in Words prepares you for better understanding portions of That Hideous Strength. And Lewis is good at this. He creates imaginative maps of the past that enable us to imaginatively inhabit other times. He calls this inhabiting the historical imagination. He writes that we must become, for example, an eighteenth-century Londoner while reading Samuel Johnson, or an Achaean chief while reading Homer.1 Only then will we be able to judge historical works as they were written. This keeps us from misreading, from projecting our own worldview onto a work, and not reading it the way the author intended.
Thus, another reason we should not neglect these works is that they help us avoid what Lewis termed “chronological snobbery” or the valuing of one age over another. Each age tends to devalue previous ages as shortsighted, or perhaps, as backward. But valuing all ages enables us to see our own age more clearly and to better interpret it. No conception of the future will be feasible without an understanding of the past, and a proper use of the historical imagination allows just that.
It strikes us that our current age views itself in many ways as the apotheosis of the historical continuum. The past is devalued as a means to informing the future. But it was Isaac Newton who said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” Lewis writes to encourage this same sort of respect for, and accurate judgment of, the past. He writes that these things keep the palliative “clean sea breeze of the centuries” blowing through our minds against the characteristic blindness of the twenty-first century.2
Yet another benefit of reading Lewis’s neglected works is that they widen our vision. Lewis writes that we read old literature because
