C. S. LEWIS IN THE SPECTATOR, 1920‑1970
From the online Archive of weekly magazine The
Spectator I have tried to extract all items in which
C. S. Lewis’s name appears (including his early pseudonym Clive Hamilton)
in the period 1920-1970. The result, pending further discoveries, is a
collection of 77 items ranging in length from over 2,500 words to only a few
dozen. Of these items, twenty were written by Lewis: nine essays, seven poems,
and four letters to the editor.
The Spectator is a British conservative
magazine established in 1828 and now, as it claims, the oldest continuously
published magazine in the English language. While the online Archive
is a wonderful resource, it has perhaps inevitably its
gaps and other imperfections. Readers interested in C. S. Lewis may save time and
DOWNLOAD HERE a full transcript (PDF)
of the items described above, excluding
Lewis’s nine essays and seven poems. Included are three of his four letters
to the editor; the letter of 11 December 1942 is found in the second
volume of Lewis’s Collected Letters. Readers may recognize the letter
published on 19 November 1943 (“Church Parade”) as the “angry letter” which
Lewis mentioned in his 1944 “Answers to Questions on Christianity” (#15).
All items are reproduced in their entirety. The sole
criterion for inclusion of an item has been whether Lewis’s name makes any sort
of appearance in it, including single brief and perhaps insignificant mentions.
The
facsimile pages underlying these
transcripts are available HERE (Dropbox folder). This collection of
facsimiles includes Lewis’s contributions. Pictured left is the page that
features his poem “On the Atomic Bomb”, published in the last issue of 1945.
In addition, here are
two facsimile collections from The
Spectator that may also be of interest to readers of C. S. Lewis:
1. A controversy that started in
November 1944 with a pseudonymous piece entitled” “What the Soldier Thinks” and continued for more than two months; Lewis’s contribution
appeared on 29 December 1944 under the title “Private Bates” and a
critical response followed two weeks later.
2. Fourteen
consecutive pages from The Spectator
of 29 April 1955 featuring a series of eight articles under the general title “Cambridge Christians”. Lewis is neither explicitly mentioned nor included as an
author in these articles; for an explanation of their relevance see my
introductory note on Lewis’s related April 1955 essay “Lilies
that Fester”.
All of Lewis’s essays
in The Spectator, along with many others, were later reprinted in one or more collections
of his shorter writings. For information on these reprints see www.lewisiana.nl/cslessays.
The poems are found in The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis: A Critical Edition,
ed. Don W. King (Kent State University Press, 2015).
Arend
Smilde
January
2016
last
updated, February 2025
with a total of seven additions
since 2016