Family Moore
On 1 August 1922, C.S. Lewis moves with Mrs Janie Moore (1872–1951) and her fifteen-year-old daughter Maureen (1906–1997) from 28 Warneford Road to Hillsboro House. Lewis gets to know them in June 1917. Hoping for an academic career, he plans to study at University College in Oxford before the summer of 1917. However, because of the First World War (1914–1918), things turn out differently, and on 8 June 1917, the eighteen-year-old Lewis joins the British Army. He is billeted at Keble College in Oxford to be trained as an officer. At Keble College, he shares a room with the young Irishman Paddy Moore (1898–1918), a peer from Bristol. They become friends, and Paddy introduces Lewis to his mother and sister, who live in Wellington Square, a few minutes walk from Keble College. Paddy’s mother, Mrs Janie Moore, stays there with the ten-year-old Maureen to be near Paddy.
Janie Moore
Janie Moore is born on 28 March 1872 in Pomeroy, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. Her father, Rev William James Askins (1842–1895), is Vicar of Dunany and Dunleer, County Louth, Ireland, from 1872 to 1895. Janie’s mother dies in 1890, and the eighteen-year-old Janie, the eldest child of five, has the task of raising the younger children. On 1 August 1897, Janie marries Courtenay Edward Moore (1870–1951), a civil engineer from Dublin. They have two children, Paddy and Maureen. It turns out to be an unhappy marriage, and shortly after the birth of Maureen in August 1906, her parents separate. Although they never divorce, Janie leaves her husband and moves to Bristol with Paddy and Maureen in 1907.
First World War
After their officer training at Keble College, C.S. Lewis and Paddy are commissioned Second Lieutenants on 26 September 1917, and given a month’s leave before leaving for the front in France. They had hoped to join the same regiment, but Paddy is assigned to the Rifle Brigade and Lewis to the Somerset Light Infantry. Instead of going home to Belfast, Lewis goes to Paddy’s home in Bristol, where he spends the first three weeks of his leave. During this visit, Lewis and Paddy probably promise each other that if one of them does not survive the war, the other will take care of his parent.
At the beginning of October 1917, Paddy goes to France, and on 19 October, C.S. Lewis joins his regiment in Crownhill, near Plymouth. On 29 November, his nineteenth birthday, he arrives at the front in France. There, he faces the final German attack on the Western Front and participates in the Battle of Arras. On 15 April 1918, Lewis is wounded on his left arm and leg by German shrapnel at Riez du Vinage. Being wounded, he cannot stay in France. On 25 May 1918, he is back in England and admitted to the Endsleigh Palace Hospital in London. Despite his urging, Father Albert does not visit him, but Mrs Moore is a frequent visitor. On 25 June, Lewis is sent to convalesce at Ashton Court, near Bristol and the home of Mrs Moore. He is expected to take two months to recover, after which he may return to France, but his recovery is slower than expected. When he later moves from Bristol to Eastbourne and from there to Andover, Mrs Moore follows him. In September 1918, they receive the sad news that Paddy was killed in action at Pargny in France on 24 March. In December 1918, Paddy Moore is posthumously awarded the British Military Cross for his gallantry at Pargny.
After the war
At the end of the First World War, on 11 November 1918, C.S. Lewis is still not properly healed. On 24 December, he is discharged from hospital and demobilised. In January 1919, he returns to University College in Oxford to begin his studies. Mrs Moore rents a home in Oxford to be near him. During the week Lewis lives in his rooms at University College. At weekends and holidays, he stays with Mrs Moore. He fully joins the household when he no longer has to live at University College in June 1921. Lewis and Mrs Moore share a home for the rest of their lives together. Over the years, they live in several different rented homes. On 1 August 1922, Lewis moves with Mrs Moore and Maureen from 28 Warneford Road to Hillsboro House. They live there until they move to The Kilns in Oxford in October 1930.
All My Road Before Me
At Mrs Moore’s suggestion, C.S. Lewis begins keeping a diary in 1922. After the death of Father Albert in September 1929, this handwritten diary from 1922 to 1927 is typed out by Lewis’s brother Warren (1895–1973) and annotated by them. In April 1991, the transcribed and edited diary is published by former secretary and biographer of Lewis and collector and editor of his writings Walter Hooper (1931–2020) as All My Road Before Me. The Diary of C.S. Lewis 1922–1927. The title, as selected by Hooper, is a quotation from Lewis’s poem Dymer.
Dymer
On 20 September 1926, C.S. Lewis publishes his narrative poem Dymer. It is based on a myth he found in his mind somewhere about his seventeenth year. The poem is about a man who conceives a monster on a mysterious beast, and once the monster has killed its father, it becomes a god. Lewis works on Dymer for nearly ten years. He begins writing a prose version of the story during Christmas 1916 under the title The Redemption of Ask, but this version did not survive. During his recovery from being wounded in the Battle of Arras in France in April 1918, new ideas cause Lewis to revise Dymer. In December 1918, he begins a verse version of the story, which also did not survive. In April 1922, Lewis starts a narrative poem on Dymer. The poem undergoes numerous revisions in the years 1922–26, but the story does not change. In the early days of his fellowship at Magdalen College in Oxford, Lewis completes his long narrative poem. Dymer is published on 20 September 1926 under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton, Lewis’s first name and his mother’s family name. Although he is still a declared atheist then, Dymer shows that Lewis is concerned with salvation. The publication of Dymer seems to mark the acceptance of a belief in a not further defined power outside himself. Dymer is reprinted in October 1950, and in October 1969, this edition is reprinted in Narrative Poems, edited by Walter Hooper.
Poems
After Dymer, C.S. Lewis writes three more narrative poems purely for the pleasure of writing and not to publish any of them. He writes The Nameless Isle in August 1930, Launcelot in the early 1930s, and The Queen of Drum between 1918 and 1938. Shortly after he is made Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University in November 1954, Lewis begins collecting his published and unpublished poems towards a publication in one volume. He goes through the notebooks with his poems written in the thirties, forties, and fifties and revises some of them. Following Lewis’s death in November 1963, Walter Hooper (1931–2020), former secretary and biographer of Lewis and collector and editor of his writings, begins collecting and editing Lewis’s poems for a volume entitled Poems. It is published in October 1964 and contains most of the poems Lewis wrote and published until his death. In May 1994, The Collected Poems is published. It consists of Spirits in Bondage from 1919, Poems from 1964, and previously unpublished poems from 1916 to 1963.
Sources
Walter Hooper, C.S. Lewis. Companion & Guide
Simon Horobin, C.S. Lewis’s Oxford
Jeffrey Schultz & John West, The C.S. Lewis Readers’ Encyclopedia