Tale of C. S. Lewis’s Vanishing Cabinet

WHEATON COLLEGE, Illinois, was founded in 1860 out on the Midwestern prairies. Its first president, Jonathan Blanchard, was a Congregational minister and a fiery abolitionist. Blanchard insisted from the very starting that the faculty can be open to women in addition to men, and to people of all races. Adeline Collins graduated in 1862; and — only a 12 months after the Civil War was over — an African American student, Edward B. Sellers, earned a Wheaton Bachelor’s degree.

Illinois is not any longer the prairie state in quite the way in which it once was, but, to at the present time, only a mile and a half north-west of the faculty is the Lincoln Marsh. And on the north-western corner of the campus stands the Wade Center, an archive dedicated to seven British authors: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, George MacDonald, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, G. K. Chesterton, and Dorothy L. Sayers. Its stone constructing is within the Tudor style — complete with a chimney — and is surrounded by English gardens. On the trail to the front door there may be a Narnian lamp-post, its flame ever burning.

THE research room — with its fireplace and, typically, a handful of students gingerly turning manuscript pages — is the true heart of the Wade Center. En route to it, nevertheless, is a one-room museum, full of startling objects: the desk on which Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; Sayers’s address book and trendy, cat-eye glasses; and rather more.

Against the south wall stands a wardrobe. It dates from the mid-Seventeenth century and was hand-carved in oak. Even its nails and hinges were handmade. The decorative carvings are geometric patterns of flowers and foliage. It stands 81 inches (206cm) tall. Its width, nevertheless, might depend upon who enters it, and when. . .

For this is just not just any piece of antique furniture. This is the very wardrobe that was in C. S. Lewis’s childhood home in Belfast. Those near Lewis called him Jack. His brother, Warren (often known as Warnie), recalled that once they were children the 2 of them would go “within the wardrobe while Jack told us his tales of adventure”. In 1930, the brothers bought the Kilns, a house in Oxford, where each of them lived for the remainder of their lives. The wardrobe got here with them.

SO, HOW and why did it find yourself within the American Midwest? The central figure in that story is Clyde S. Kilby, a professor of literature from Tennessee who joined the Wheaton faculty in 1935. Already, through the Second World War, he had grow to be an enthusiastic admirer of Lewis’s writings. Kilby and Lewis struck up an ongoing, friendly correspondence, and the Wheaton professor even once met Lewis in Oxford.

Lewis found Kilby’s views — not least on literary and spiritual subjects — to be generally congenial, although he was also occasionally disconcerted by being treated as a “great man”. When Kilby suggested that he would really like to edit an anthology of a few of Lewis’s works, the Oxford don squashed the concept with the firm retort that it could be “quite ridiculous” to anthologise a “living author”. Nevertheless, Lewis took note that there was an intense and perceptive appreciation of his writings amongst these American conservative Protestants.

AS EARLY as June 1962, Warnie stepped in to jot down to Kilby, explaining that his brother was too sick to answer to “your kind letter”. The last letter that Lewis himself wrote to Kilby was dated 20 November 1962; he died of kidney failure almost exactly one 12 months later, on 22 November 1963. In his will, Lewis made it clear that he envisaged his brother continuing to live on the Kilns, surrounded by all of the objects that the 2 of them had collected, including “all my books furniture and manuscripts”, whether of their home or in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College.

In 1965, Kilby determined that Wheaton College would create a dedicated “C. S. Lewis Collection”. As a place to begin, he donated the letters that he had received from Lewis. Kilby had a present for friendship. He struck up relationships with other members of the Inklings as well, and even arranged for Owen Barfield to come back to Wheaton to talk.

Kilby’s relationship with Tolkien became so strong that the American professor spent the summer of 1966 with the writer of The Lord of the Rings, working with him as a kind of editorial assistant on the manuscript that became The Silmarillion. Given that several of them were fantasy authors, possibly it’s pardonably fanciful to think about Kilby as a sort of corresponding member of the Inklings.

WARNIE died on 9 April 1973, and this was the moment when Kilby’s enthusiasm and vision really bore fruit. Warnie had believed within the C. S. Lewis Collection. In his will, he stipulated: “I give to Wheaton College Illinoise [sic] U.S.A. all letters manuscripts etc of the late Professor C. S. Lewis which could also be present in my effects.”

That was a sizeable manuscript donation. Kilby also persuaded others who had received letters from Lewis to donate them. Wheaton’s Wade Center (the house of what Kilby originally called the C. S. Lewis Collection) is the archive with by far essentially the most original Lewis letters and manuscripts.

TO COMPLETE this story, yet yet one more link on this elven-forged chain continues to be required. Warnie knew, and had freely remarked to others, that the hand-carved, oaken wardrobe from their Belfast childhood which they’d brought with them to the Kilns was the very piece of furniture which had helped to encourage his brother to jot down his fantasy novel The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950).

Still, one suspects that Warnie judged that pondering of objects associated together with his brother as museum pieces would likewise be “quite ridiculous”. His will stipulated that the household furniture was to be sold to pay his debts and funeral expenses. It was all auctioned off within the regular way, intended only for atypical people seeking to furnish their homes.

Kilby, nevertheless, could see that the wardrobe had a significance beyond merely household furnishings. He learned that Robert Bartel, a Wheaton class-of-1953 graduate, can be in England, and Kilby convinced him to go to the auction and buy the wardrobe on behalf of the faculty. It was a cash-only event, and a nervous Bartel arrived at his first-ever auction with a wad of British pound notes in his pocket. He successfully made the acquisition, and the wardrobe was duly shipped off to the prairie state.

TODAY, a standard sight on the Wade Center is for a category of elementary school children to file in, and for every boy and girl to look at the wardrobe in turn, one after the other. Visitors are even allowed to open its doors. Inside, they find two vintage cloth coats and 7 fur ones.

As it’s a widely known incontrovertible fact that one returns to our world at the very same time as one left, nevertheless, there is no such thing as a easy strategy to discover how lots of them also discover a Narnian adventure.

Timothy Larsen teaches at Wheaton College. His most up-to-date book is The Fires of Moloch: Anglican clergymen within the furnace of World War One (Oxford University Press, 2025).