Will the Real Lamppost Please Stand Up

An Instagram post from a friend put me over the edge. In his post, my friend said that someone told him the lamppost pictured above, in Green Park, London, was THE lamppost that inspired C. S. Lewis to put a lamppost in his Narnia stories, beginning with The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

The reason this claim pushed me over the edge is because I have heard it so many times before...

On a research trip to Belfast, I was told by one of the staff at Campbell College, where Lewis attended school for one semester, that the lamppost pictured below, on the grounds of the college, was THE lamppost that inspired the one in Narnia.

Then on that same trip in 2015, when a friend and I arrived in Great Malvern, England (another town where Lewis went to school) we read that the lamppost pictured below was THE lamppost that inspired Lewis...

By the way, if you are looking for THE lamppost in Great Malvern, it is just outside a side door to the Priory.

Then in Oxford the claim is made that the lamppost pictured above, right beside the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin is THE lamppost.

Some say the reason this lamppost may really be the one is because there is a Tumnus-like carving nearby...

Not to be outdone by Oxford, Cambridge also claims that it has the REAL lamppost...

And this one in Cambridge really looks like it could be THE lamppost. After all, it is missing the crossbar on one side. If you don't know why that is significant then you need to read The Magician's Nephew where Lewis tells us how the lamppost got into Narnia in the first place.

But maybe the real lamppost (pictured above) is in Headington, near Lewis' home, The Kilns. At least the folks in Headington think so.

My friend, Steve Jenkins, has a lamppost in his garden in Watford that looks a likely candidate. And we must remember that C. S. Lewis' first school was in Watford, so maybe Steve has the REAL lamppost.

Or maybe THE lamppost that inspired C. S. Lewis is in London after all. Maybe it's the one I snapped a picture of in Trafalgar Square. After all, this lamppost has a statue of Aslan next to it.

Truth be told... I know where THE REAL LAMPPOST is and I took the photo of it below so I should know...

But I'm not telling where it is... So there!

All we really know about the lamppost in Narnia is that it originally came from London where it stood in front of the two houses where Digory and Polly lived. And all we know about the location of those two houses is this: "And in those days there lived in London a girl called Polly Plummer. She lived in one of a long row of houses which were all joined together." (Lewis, C.S. The Magician's Nephew: The Chronicles of Narnia (p. 1). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.)

All that Lewis has to say about the inspiration for The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is in his little essay entitled "It All Began with a Picture". But Lewis says nothing about the lamppost. Alas...

The Editor has asked me to tell you how I came to write The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I will try, but you must not believe all that authors tell you about how they wrote their books. This is not because they mean to tell lies. It is because a man writing a story is too excited about the story itself to sit back and notice how he is doing it. In fact, that might stop the works; just as, if you start thinking about how you tie your tie, the next thing is that you find you can’t tie it. And afterwards, when the story is finished, he has forgotten a good deal of what writing it was like.

One thing I am sure of. All my seven Narnian books, and my three science-fiction books, began with seeing pictures in my head. At first they were not a story, just pictures. The Lion all began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself: ‘Let’s try to make a story about it.’

At first I had very little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it. I think I had been having a good many dreams of lions about that time. Apart from that, I don’t know where the Lion came from or why He came. But once He was there He pulled the whole story together, and soon He pulled the six other Narnian stories in after Him.

So you see that, in a sense, I know very little about how this story was born. That is, I don’t know where the pictures came from. And I don’t believe anyone knows exactly how he ‘makes things up’. Making up is a very mysterious thing. When you ‘have an idea’ could you tell anyone exactly how you thought of it?

(Lewis, C. S. Of Other Worlds, pp. 101-102, HarperOne, Kindle Edition)

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