C.S. Lewis was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1898.

- Born in Belfast in 1898; "Jack" to his close friends. - Mother died when he was 9, sent to boarding school in England. - Wounded in 1918, became a professor at Oxford in 1925. - Converted to Christianity in 1931, after a night of discussion with Tolkien. ## **In brief**

Clive Staples Lewis was born on November 29, 1898, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. His father, Albert, was a lawyer. His mother, Flora Hamilton, daughter of a pastor, was a mathematician, which was unusual at the time. At around four years old, he decided he would be called "Jacksie," then "Jack," and this is how his close friends would know him for the rest of his life. With his older brother Warren, nicknamed "Warnie," he spent rainy days in the attic of Little Lea, the family's large home filled with books. There, they invented Boxen, a land of talking animals who had their own kings, trains, and political intrigues.

In August 1908, Flora died of cancer. Jack was nine years old. He would later say that all stable happiness had then vanished from his life. A few weeks later, his father sent him to boarding school in England, to Wynyard School, a grim institution run by a harsh headmaster. Other schools followed, including Malvern, which he hated. He lost the faith of his childhood around the age of thirteen.

## **Did you know**

As a teenager, Jack discovered what he would call "the Joy": an intense and bittersweet longing, awakened by Norse mythology, Wagner's music, or a miniature garden in a biscuit tin. This nostalgia for elsewhere would become the guiding thread of his life. In 1914, he was entrusted to a tutor, William T. Kirkpatrick, a formidable logician who taught him to argue and made him read Homer in the original text. In 1916, at a train station, he bought by chance Phantastes by George MacDonald: he would say that this book "baptized his imagination."

## **On screen**

Enlisted at University College, Oxford, Lewis joined the army in 1917. As a second lieutenant in the Somerset Light Infantry, he arrived at the front in northern France on his nineteenth birthday. On April 15, 1918, he was wounded by a British shell that fell short near Arras. His friend Paddy Moore was killed. True to a promise, Lewis took care of Paddy's mother, Janie Moore, and her daughter Maureen, with whom he would live for over thirty years.

## **Going further**

Upon his return to Oxford, he earned top honors in three subjects: classical literature, philosophy, and English literature. In 1919, he published a collection of poems, Spirits in Bondage, under the name Clive Hamilton. In 1925, he became a fellow and tutor in English literature at Magdalen College, where he would teach for nearly thirty years. There, in 1926, he met J.R.R. Tolkien, a Catholic philologist.

## **The story**

Step by step, his friends and his readings (Chesterton, MacDonald) shook his atheism. In 1929, alone in his Magdalen room, he admitted that God is God and described himself as "the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England." That same year, his father died. On the night of September 19-20, 1931, a long walk along Addison's Walk with Tolkien and Hugo Dyson convinced him that the story of the Gospels is a myth that actually happened. A few days later, on the way to the Whipsnade Zoo on his brother's sidecar, he realized he believed that Jesus is the Son of God. He would recount this journey in The Pilgrim's Regress (1933) and later in Surprised by Joy (1955).

## **In the books** - [Biography of C.S. Lewis (2): From the Inklings to Narnia, 1932-1963](/lewis/biographie-de-cs-lewis-2-1932-1963/) - [Digory Kirke](/personnages/digory-kirke/) - [From Belfast to the Wardrobe: Jack's life in ten mysteries and their echoes in Narnia](/lewis/de-belfast-a-l-armoire/) - [From the Trenches to Evacuee Children: How Two Wars Opened the Wardrobe](/lewis/des-tranchees-aux-enfants-evacues/) - [The Kilns Household: Warnie, "Minto," and Maureen, the family Jack chose](/lewis/la-maisonnee-des-kilns/) - [The Alter Ego and the Anti-Self: Arthur Greeves and Owen Barfield, the two friendships that shaped Lewis](/lewis/l-alter-ego-et-l-anti-moi/)